THIS IS MY BLOG!
Some bad news for the vehement anti-war set
A new chart reveals that in the last decade, spending on national security, Iraq, and Afghanistan combined paled in comparison to entitlement spending — 19% to 65%, respectively. Over to you, infographic:
“About 65 percent of federal expenditures over the last ten years have gone towards entitlements,”Paul Miller writes. “By comparison, about 15 percent has gone towards national defense, excluding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Iraq has cost three percent, and only about one percent has gone towards the war in Afghanistan (including the cost of ongoing military operations and all reconstruction and stabilization assistance combined), according to my analysis of figures from OMB.”
In other words, Miller says, “Afghanistan is the second-cheapest major war in U.S. history as a percentage of GDP, according to the Congressional Research Service.”
From HERE.
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Little tidbits like this that come out make one love history.
Johnny Cash stationed in Landsberg, Germany in the Air Force where he was enlisted for four years as the Korean War was underway and the Cold War was hitting its stride. Cash found out he had a knack for quickly decrypting Morse code and intercepting Soviet radio transmissions (he also learned to drink beer during his service). In fact, it was Cash who located the signal of the Soviet jet bomber on its maiden flight from Moscow, and he was also the first Westerner to decipher the news that the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had died on March 5th, 1953, of a brain hemorrhage.
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Politicians never learn! So called sin taxes have never worked! But they continue on taxing and wanting more taxes.
No, this isn’t a story about Mark Block. Out in the Land of Lincoln, the state is facing a serious shortfall in their Medicaid funding. (A story which is being repeated across the nation, in case you haven’t been keeping score.) But the Governor has a plan! Fear not, citizens. We’ll raise the money to help people with their medical bills by counting on people smoking more. What could possibly go wrong?
Illinois’ Medicaid program faces a $2.7 billion shortage that its governor has promised to deal with. So how does Gov. Pat Quinn propose to close the fiscal gap for his biggest budget item and largest health program? By relying on the state’s smokers to keep puffing — and paying — away…
There are two main reasons why cigarette taxes don’t bring in the bucks their supporters promise. The first is that higher taxes encourage smuggling from nearby low-tax states. Minnesota, for example, has been ratcheting up its cigarette tax for decades — and now has one of the highest rates of cigarette smuggling in the country, according to the state’s Department of Revenue. And after New York City hiked its cigarette tax by $1.42 per pack in 2002, a report by the city’s Independent Budget Office found that more than a quarter of the city’s smokers were avoiding the cigarette taxes. (Tax evasion cost the city an estimated $40 million in 2006.) This is a nationwide problem: Estimates indicate that states lose an estimated $5 billion tax revenue to tobacco smuggling each year.
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This in from Australia. See, global warming nuts are all over our planet, coming up with new ways to save the planet while screwing the people.
More of those green jobs that climate changers keep promising:
And the best part of this scheme is that the capital investment is so cheap:
“You just need a pair of pliers.”
This is the kind of economic shift we need: from extracting coal to extracting teeth.
But it’s bizarre for global warmists to freak about mercury in teeth when they’ve gladly inflicted on us light bulbs stuffed with the stuff:
From HERE.
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Photo proof people!
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More civility from the left.
I don’t hear Democrats calling for the end of death threats to conservatives in the Wisconsin legislature, do you? National Democrats are pouring money into the Wisconsin recall election and invoking the Koch brothers as the boogeymen, but nobody’s said “boo” about these threats of violence. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) believes it’s important to spread the word, even if the media ignores the situation.
Sen. Ron Johnson said Thursday that every member of the state legislature in Wisconsin received an email that said “we’re going to put a bullet in your head. We know where you and your family live.”
Johnson, speaking in Washington, D.C. at America’s Future Foundation’s annual gala, said that at the height of Gov. Scott Walker’s fight against the unions, every member of the state legislature was threatened.
“The story really wasn’t told properly — we had every member of the state legislature get an email that said, ‘We’re going to put a bullet in your head. We know where you and your family lives.’ Now, that wasn’t reported very well because I guess that’s not newsworthy when it’s a union thug making a threat against a conservative.”
Johnson told The Daily Caller that the high level of intimidation and political divisiveness in Wisconsin is due to Walker’s fight to reign in spending pushed by public sector unions.
“Scott Walker did a hard thing — he actually solved a problem, and he did it in a way that recognized and addressed one of the growing problems here, and that is really the power of the public sector unions and, I would say, the unholy alliance between elected officials that get supported by those unions and the unions themselves,” Johnson told TheDC.
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COLUMN: TEAM OBAMA’S REPUTATION IS VASTLY OVERRATED
We are rapidly approaching the moment at which Washington reevaluates the Obama campaign’s reputation for competence and expertise. Every week, one or several of Obama’s surrogates trip over their own words; every day, Jim Messina and David Plouffe and David Axelrod must scratch their heads in wonder at the mess they are creating. One gaffe is an isolated event. Two is an embarrassment. But three or more form a pattern, one that is damaging not only Obama’s precarious chances for reelection but also the fortunes of the Democratic Party.
The most recent trouble arrived last Sunday in the person of Newark Mayor Cory Booker, who went fantastically off message when he said his fellow Democrats’ attacks on Mitt Romney’s background in private equity are “nauseating.” The Obama for America hazardous waste disposal team leapt into action, forcing Booker to record a hostage-video-like recantation of his comments by the end of the day. It was too late, though. Booker had tested the waters of intra-Democrat dissent and had found they were warm. Dianne Feinstein, Chris Coons, Steve Rattner, Ed Rendell, Artur Davis, Harold Ford Jr., Mark Warner, and Joe Manchin all followed him in.
What Obama intended as an attack on the business practices of Bain Capital transmogrified into a debate over the fairness of that attack. The press hates hypocrites, and it did not take much digging to report that Obama raised more from private equity in the 2008 cycle than any other candidate, and that the president’s negative ad buy went up on the very day he held a $35,800 per plate fundraised in New York City with the president of private equity firm Blackstone.
Not even MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell could reconcile the war on Bain with the fact thatObama has taken more than $200,000 from the likes of Bain Capital managing Director Jonathan Lavine, not to mention tens of thousands from Landmark Partners Chairman Francisco Borges. The man would not even be president without the longstanding support of Chicago’s Pritzker family, which knows something about, inthe words of Rep. James Clyburn (D., S.C.), “raping companies and leaving them in debt.”
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This is a horrible way to die!
Pa. Man, 2 Sons Found Dead In Kent County Manure Pit
KENNEDYVILLE, Md. (WJZ)– A disturbing discovery on an Eastern Shore farm. The bodies of a father and his two teenage sons were found in an animal waste pond. It appears to be a tragic accident that has rocked the Kennedyville community in Kent County.
Mike Hellgren reports.
Hope turned to heartbreak as rescue workers and neighboring farmers tried to rescue the father and his two sons. In the end, they could not.
From above, you can see the large, dark pit filled with animal waste. The painstaking search to find the bodies inside took hours.
Glen Nolt, 48, and his two sons– 18-year-old son Kelvin Nolt and 14-year-old Gleason Nolt– were pronounced dead at the scene.
Betty Freeman, who lives at the entrance to the farm, is heartsick.
“I just can’t imagine anything like that occurring. You know, falling and drowning in that liquid manure. It’s unthinkable,” she said.
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Senator Chuck Schumer, one of the mouthiest politicians of the last half century never at a loss for words, can’t be reached for comment on President Obama’s Bain Capital attack strategy. Which is rather odd, considering his remarkable past abilities to raise money from Wall Street firms. What’s going on?
The answer is pretty simple. The awful truth is beginning to dawn on Democrats. Obama is trashing not just the United Sates economy, he is attacking major donors upon whom the Democrats have come to rely. Senators from New York like Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand are going to need to hit up the very people being demonized by the Obama campaign. All well and good if Obama wins — after all, where are these donors going to go for political protection if Obama wins another term? They will for over the big bucks to avoid regulatory harassment, and other avoidable costs. The understand well that a shakedown system is in place.
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The president’s trip to the Bay Area last week made it painfully clear that the Barack Obama re-election campaign has lost its mojo.
There was no life, no personality, no memorable line or moment and no real enthusiasm in the entire fundraising foray. In short, there was no buzz.
It was like a summer rerun of a show that wasn’t very interesting to begin with.
Worse yet, Obama sounded like he was playing catch-up to Mitt Romney. I can’t think of anything that should have him in that role, but he’s acting like the underdog.
Obama was more than a candidate last time out. He was a popular and cultural phenomenon. A rock star. But the trouble with rock stars is that they drop like a rock once fans conclude they are “over.”
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Some perspective here…
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The History Boys
Obama’s fiscal blowout that never happened, according to Obama.
Riffing on the re-election trail, President Obama often tells crowds that “We’ve got to move forward to the future we imagined in 2008.” An imaginary future from the past—got it. Then there’s the imaginary history of the past that Mr. Obama has been recounting lately, when his first-term spending and debt boom never happened.
Mitt Romney “warned about a ‘prairie fire of debt.’ That’s what he said,” Mr. Obama said on the Des Moines fairgrounds on Thursday, as if he couldn’t believe it either. “He left out some facts. His speech was more like a cow pie of distortion,” Mr. Obama continued, with the finely shaded eloquence for which he is known. “What my opponent didn’t tell you was that federal spending since I took office has risen at the slowest pace of any President in almost 60 years.”
Making this a new White House theme, press secretary Jay Carney chimed in to “make the point, as an editor might say” to White House reporters that they should not “buy into the B.S. that you hear about spending and fiscal constraint with regard to this Administration. I think doing so is a sign of sloth and laziness.”
Mr. Carney the media critic deeply sourced his view to someone named Rex Nutting, who wrote an 856-word column for MarketWatch that argued “There has been no huge increase in spending under the current President, despite what you hear.”
Mr. Nutting claims that spending is rising at 1.4% annually, versus 8.1% for George W. Bush’s second term. How did he manage to suss out the insights that have eluded every other human being who has spent time with the historical budget tables? His accounting methods are, er, unusual.
Read it all HERE.
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My (twisted) life with the Kennedys
In the aftermath of Mary Richardson Kennedy’s suicide, Patricia Lawford Stewart reveals to The Post how the storied political family mistreated her and her husband, Peter Lawford
Robert Kennedy Jr., who has spent the last week and a half publicly absolving himself of any responsibility for the suicide of his estranged wife, Mary, has been a coarse, entitled womanizer for decades, according to a former family intimate who fended him off.
Patricia Lawford Stewart, who was married to former Kennedy in-law Peter Lawford, reached out to The Post after last week’s funeral for Mary, appalled — but not surprised — by the Kennedy clan’s insistence that Mary was a lifelong depressive and alcoholic.
Before the funeral, Mary’s former sister-in-law and self-described “best, best friend,” Kerry Kennedy, strolled over to the press pool. “Mary suffered from depression,” Kerry said. “She was battling those demons.”
Robert, according to Robert’s eulogy, was just a good husband who tried so hard to help, not the boozy ex-heroin addict who publicly ran around on his wife, cut her off financially and took custody of their children, thereby demolishing every aspect of her life and identity.
“The Kennedy family is on damage control 24/7,” Stewart says. “They were ruinous to my husband, and they have harassed me for the last 28 years. I’m 54 years old, and I can’t deal with this crap anymore.”
Read it all HERE>
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