Ten Letters

It's reported that President Obama reads 10 letters from ordinary citizens each night before going to bed.  These letters, culled from the estimated 40,000 that the White House receives each week, supposedly keep him grounded and keenly aware of the real world outside his protective bubble.  Given the policy disasters of his first year, and his repeated attempts to follow a path a majority of Americans wish he would abandon, the people responsible for choosing these letters should be fired.  Forget Ben Bernanke, Larry Summers, or Tim Geithner.  Someone at the U.S. Postal Service is gabbing mail intended for the North Pole and redirecting it to the White House.

While writing this post, it occurred to me that "Ten Letters" is made up of 10 letters.  There are also ten letters in the words "Santa Claus", "the economy", and "George Bush."  Perhaps the president should try 9 letters from constituents instead.  Scratch that, "impeached" has nine letters.    

Bits and Pieces

I caught this in this morning's New York Times editorial.  "It is reported that he (Obama) seeks out dissenting views doggedly."   Shouldn't the NYT know if the president doggedly seeks dissenting viewpoints?  Don't they have their own reporters?  I'm pretty sure the NYT has access to the White House.

The White House wants to go after the banks with heavy taxes, levies, fines, whatever.  Won't the banks just pass those added costs on to the consumer?  What the American people don't understand, and what has never been fully explained to them, is that if the banks were in such deep trouble that they needed hundreds of billions of our money to bail them out, then why is it that within months of us doing so, those same banks were recording record profits and doling out billions in bonuses?  It just doesn't add up.

Poll results from the Scott Brown victory continue to show that national security/terrorism played a much bigger role in the election then many had thought.  This is another case of Barack Obama being on the wrong side of an issue with regards to the American public.  If Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, don't reverse course on their plans for a trial in New York City for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, this issue alone may be the Democrats undoing in November.

President Obama insists that "the same anger that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office."  Sorry Mr. President, it's not the same anger.  Another swing and a miss.  Let's tally his average so far.  Chicago Olympics, New Jersey, Virginia, Massachusetts....0 for 4.  We either need a designated hitter or a new batter.  I prefer the latter.  How about you?

Kudos to President Obama for his presidential memorandum or directive aimed at stopping tax delinquents from receiving government contracts.  Apparently the Government Accounting Office has identified tens of thousands of companies that continue to get paid to do work for the U. S. government, but owe the IRS $5 billion in back taxes.  In his remarks he said, "You pay the taxes you owe because it's a fundamental responsibility of citizenship.  And yet, somehow, it's become standard practice in Washington to give contracts to companies that don't pay their taxes."  You mean like the contract you gave Timothy Geithner to run your Treasury Department?

Senseless

It's clear from last night's election coverage and this morning's talkfests that Obama supporters have gone totally Helen Keller.  They didn't hear nor heed the warnings from Virginia or New Jersey, and still don't understand what happened to them in Massachusetts.  They are not just tone deaf, they are blind and may take leave of any remaining senses.  Last night, uber progressive and historical footnote Howard Dean, remained steadfast that the only mistake Democrats have made is that they haven't been liberal enough.  He even said that America remains a center-left nation.  Center-left!?  This morning David Axelrod, Obama's strategy guru, when asked if the White House should take some responsibility for the Democrats defeat in Massachusetts, said that "many things" were at play and that Scott Brown never even ran a commercial against health care reform.  Brrrring..........brrrring..........brrrring......click.  No one's answering, they must be getting their lessons down at the well again.

By all accounts Obama and his allies in Congress are still figuring ways in which to pass Obamacare.  Should they do it before Scott Brown can be seated, use their simple majority in reconciliation, or just make the House swallow what's already been cooked up in the Senate.  Big questions for even bigger egos.  If they're dumb enough to do any of those things, and I think they are, then they haven't seen 'nothin yet.  The anger that will pour forth from all corners of America will eventually bury them all under a sea of red come November.

Pollsters and aides for Scott Brown are beginning to tell their stories from the campaign trail.  Seems that Mr. Brown's numbers began to rise after Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Nebraska) and Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-Louisiana) cut their deals with Harry Reid in mid December.  Mr. Brown's numbers surpassed Martha Coakley's after Obama  decided to try the would-be Christmas bomber from Flight 253 in civil court and make American taxpayers pay for his defense.  The price of Obamacare and the president's coddling of terrorists proved too much for Massachusetts voters.

All the pundits are suggesting that Obama can readjust his course just as Bill Clinton did after the 1994 Republican sweep of Congress.  They offer that, like Clinton, Obama can gain a second term if he just slows the train down and becomes more bipartisan.  On the contrary, I hope he doesn't and I don't think he will.  I hope that he doesn't because what Obama and the Democrats have exposed, to those who were blind to it in the past, is their socialist roots and their desire to make America more like Europe.  They wish to remove everything that makes America unique, competitive, powerful or superior.  They seek a sameness so that no one could, should, or would ever feel the need to live better, freer, smarter or safer than we do here in the USA.  And for that they must be purged from all offices of power and kept as far away as possible from all levers of authority and influence as possible.

Karma, Irony, and Truthiness in Massachusetts

We awaken today on the cusp of an historic election in Massachusetts.  Republican candidate Scott Brown is poised to defeat Democrat candidate Martha Coakley to fill the senate seat left vacant by the late Edward M. Kennedy.   The Bay State hasn't elected a Republican to the U. S. Senate since 1972.  How did we ever get to this place?

Karma is catching up with the Democrats in Massachusetts.  My computer dictionary defines karma as "the sum of a person's actions in this and previous states of existence, viewed as deciding the fate in future existences."  Several years ago in Massachusetts, when Republican Mitt Romney was governor, Democrats took away his authority to appoint a replacement in the event that a U. S. Senate seat became vacant.  Remember that in 2004, MA Senator John Kerry was supposed to defeat President George Bush.  That of course did not happen, but when  Teddy Kennedy died last year leaving a U. S. Senate seat vacant and Democrat Governor Deval Patrick unable to name a replacement, Democrats changed the law once again.  Karma exacts a heavy price for dirty deeds done dirt cheap.

Irony runs as thick as a Southie accent in Massachusetts.  Once again, my computer tells me that irony is "a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing."  In 1972, Massachusetts was the only state in the country that did not participate in Richard Nixon's landslide victory, voting for Democrat presidential candidate George McGovern instead.  They did however re-elect Edward Brooke, the first African American ever elected to the U. S. Senate, and the last Republican from Massachusetts to sit in that august body.  Fast forward to today where there exists the very real chance that a Scott Brown victory will kill any chance of Obamacare ever becoming a reality.  The irony of an iconic senator's lifetime pursuit, health care reform, being passed in his memory and then defeated, again due to his death, is remarkable.  Truth is indeed stranger than fiction.

Truth is a hard thing to swallow.  Stephen Colbert coined his phase truthiness, as "a truth that a person claims to know intuitively 'from the gut' without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts."  The truthiness of Obamacare, cap and trade, private industry bailouts, big government and big labor, indeed the entire progressive agenda, as demonstrated by President Obama and Governor Patrick, or any other Democrat that wishes to follow same, is a recipe for disaster and quickly becoming an anathema to a growing majority of Americans.

40 Acres And A Mule Redux

The picture at right, by artist Bryan Christie, from a story in Fortune magazine, I plucked from an internet site called Treehugger.com, depicts a vision of urban farming in the city of Detroit. For the last several years, ever since the automobile industry began to implode, scores of entrepreneurs, urban planners, envirogeeks, and any other category of scallywag you can think of, has been trying to determine a suitable and sustainable future for the Motor City.  Farming, it turns out, just might be the answer.

Today, Detroit is an extremely large vestige of its former self.  For a city that once boasted 2 million inhabitants, less than half of that remains, spread across 139 square miles.  It's footprint is larger than San Francisco, Boston, and Manhattan combined.  Unfortunately almost 30% of it, or about 40 square miles, is absolutely vacant.  Barren.  Bereft of anything that generates income, pays taxes, or contributes much of anything in making Detroit a desirable place to live.  The unemployment rate is nearly 30%, although everyone including the new mayor, Dave Bing, believes it's really closer to 50%.   48 buildings in  downtown sit empty.  The average price of a home is $15,000.  No major brand grocery store exists to serve the cities' residents.  Hard to imagine then, given those statistics and what passes for adequate resources, that Detroit can ever be anything like the "arsenal of democracy" it once was.

Yet Detroit could very well return to its roots as an agricultural center.  A hundred years ago, before Henry Ford, large narrow farms grew inward from the river maintained by German, Polish, and French-Canadian immigrants.  Although those tracts of land were replaced by large automobile manufacturing plants and their supportive industries last century, today over 900 urban gardens have begun to repurpose that land once again for agricultural use.   Although many of these gardens are community-based and no bigger than a quarter of an acre, larger enterprises, like Hantz Farms, are gobbling up vast swaths of blight at $3,000 per acre.  John Hantz, who made his fortune in financing, wants to invest $30 million in an agricultural makeover for Detroit.  "This is like buying a penthouse in New York in 1940," he says.  "No one should be able to afford to do this ever again."

I hope, for the future of Detroit, that Hantz Farms is successful and that entrepreneurs like Mr. Hantz continue to dream up ways of making Michigan profitable once again and providing much needed jobs for the people in Detroit.  I also recognize the irony of hundreds of thousands of African Americans, whose ancestors fled the cotton fields of the Deep South, for Henry Fords' five dollars a day wages over a century ago, contemplating the prospects of providing for their families through farming once again.  And for that they can thank the excesses of labor unions, liberal urban policies, and corrupt politicians who've run roughshod over their community for decades.

Promise Keepers

We didn't need to hear from President Obama to know that America would immediately step up to the plate and do what America always does in helping to ameliorate pain and suffering when disaster strikes throughout the world.  Yes, I suppose it's comforting to a hear an American  president try and reassure the victims and remind us all, that has human beings, we have an obligation to care for and help one another.  But in light of past promises made, and broken, by Barack Obama, i.e., no lobbyists in my administration, my administration will be the most open and transparent, won't sign any congressional earmarks into law, don't want to be in the car business, health care debate will air on C-SPAN, Obamacare will not increase the deficit, taxes will not go up on families making less than $250,000, allow five days of public comment before bills are signed, well you get the picture.  I don't wish to make light of a serious situation, but if I were a Haitian awaiting relief on the tarmac in Port-au-Prince, I would be consoled knowing the spirit and generosity of the Americans people were on its way, rather than rely on the politically expedient and fleeting words of Barack Obama.    

I don't know about you, but I'm already tired of the way some in the media are portraying the White House response to the Haitian earthquake as somehow unique or extraordinary for the United States.  Just because Hurricane Katrina temporarily overwhelmed the capacities and the resources of an inept mayor and governor, followed quickly by a bungled response from federal authorities through FEMA, doesn't mean that  we don't know how to do disaster response.  The United States of America is king of disaster and humanitarian relief.  This is what we do best of all.  We will spend more, send more, and do more than any other country on the planet to help Haiti recover, and we would have done so, and will continue to do so, well after Barack Obama passes into obscurity.

Livin' Large On OPM

The Mackinac Center for Public Policy, Michigan's conservative think tank. just released the Michigan School District Health Insurance database where you can find your school district and the costs associated with health care coverage of school employees.  Suffice it to say it's an eye opener.  Michigan taxpayers spend $2 billion a year on the high priced health care of Johnny's teachers, principals, lunch ladies, playground attendants, bus drivers, and custodians.  Multiply this by well over 500 school districts and it doesn't take very long to get to $2 billion.  Regardless of what district employes them, school personnel are basically state employees.  It's also understandable that health care coverage would be offered as part of their pay package.  But when you consider how little they contribute to their own coverage, especially in light of what you might pay for you own, it becomes a little unsettling.  More than a little unsettling really, more like an outrage.

Consider for instance that in more than half of Michigan school districts, 301 to be exact, teachers pay nothing toward their own coverage.  These plans can sometimes cost as much as $16,000 per year!  Even where some districts have had the audacity to save the taxpayer some money in recent years by giving the teachers unions' own health care provider MESSA the boot, some copays might still be as little as $55 per month, or just 4%.  Contrast this to the private sector where average family premiums in Michigan, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, were $2,500 annually, or 22%, on coverage costing just over $11,000.   I don't know about you but I know what an additional $2000 would mean to my wallet.  Put another way, the money the union saves on the subsidization from Michigan taxpayers can go a long way toward getting more Democrats elected to political office.

To see the report from the Mackinac Center, go to  http://www.mackinac.org/depts/epi/insurance.aspx.