Politics
RE: U.S. Census Notification
Mar 10th
Before becoming President, Barack Obama was a "community organizer" who taught groups like ACORN a special type of math that would ensure their "fair share".
Like Henshaw, your venerable Daily Plunge host, Club Soda received a notice from the Census Bureau stating that the Bureau would soon invade my home with a form to fill out with such pertinent information as my race, gender and so on and so forth. As noted in Henshaw’s earlier post about the Census Bureau notification, it reads in part:
Your response is important. Results from the 2010 Census will be used to help each community get its fair share of government funds for highways, schools, health facilities, and many other programs you and your neighbors need. Without a complete, accurate census, your community may not receive its fair share.
As with the Henshaw notice, the words “fair share” made an appearance on my notification form. I immediately picked up my copy of The Federalist Papers, which also includes The Declaration of Independence, The Articles of Confederation and The Constitution, to see what the founders had to say about getting my “fair share”.
Shockingly, the phrase “fair share” does not make an appearance in either The Constitution or in any of the letters that constitute the founders’ defense of the new Constitution, The Federalist Papers. However, I did find some interesting notes about the census, its purpose and why the founders believed a census was a crucial element of the republic.
“As the accuracy of the census to be obtained by the Congress will necessarily depend, in a considerable degree, on the disposition, if not on the cooperation of the States,” wrote James Madison in Federalist No. 54, “it is of great importance that the States should feel as little bias as possible to swell or to reduce the amount of their numbers. Were their share of representation alone to be governed by this rule, they would have an interest in exaggerating their inhabitants. Were the rule to decide their share of taxation alone, a contrary temptation would prevail. By extending the rule to both objects, the State will have opposite interests which will control and balance each other and produce the requisite impartiality.”
With the ratification of the 16th Amendment in 1913, which established the personal income tax, these “opposite interests” – taxation versus representation – no longer applied. Now, the temptation to exaggerate essentially doubles with the added incentive for everyone to grab their “fair share” when it comes time for the Feds to dole out cash.
As Madison implied, without some type of counterbalance to ensure an accurate and unbiased census, corruption would taint the entire process as the states and various special-interest groups within those states would look for ways to make the numbers come out in their favor. This is fertile ground for ACORN-like groups that are not above filling out forms on behalf of dead people, movie stars and professional athletes in order to get their “fair share”.
Nancy Pelosi’s Congress
Mar 10th
This video has been making the rounds over the last twenty-four hours. It’s Nancy Pelosi at her finest. What ever happened to transparent government?
The sad thing is she’s probably right. There are enough handout and giveaways in this bill to perhaps win over enough people to make it popular.
U.S. Census Notification
Mar 9th
I have some more news about the Census. This time it’s a little more personal. The United States Census Bureau sent a notification to my address today. My household will be getting our Census form in about a week. Plus, the form has a handy explanation of why filling out the form is important.
Your response is important. Results from the 2010 Census will be used to help each community get its fair share of government funds for highways, schools, health facilities, and many other programs you and your neighbors need. Without a complete, accurate census, your community may not receive its fair share.
I guess the Constitutional explanation was too difficult. The Census was designed to determine representation and taxation only, not some kind of income redistribution giveaway. The exact quote from the constitution reads: “representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers.” The words “fair” and “share” are conspicuously absent from Article I of the Constitution.
The notification is also in Spanish, just in case illegal immigrants wish to participate in the American experiment. If you happen to speak French, German, Chinese, or Italian, I’m sorry; you’ll just have to learn English first. Then there’s the plight of the the Taiwanese American.
Health Care = Statism
Mar 9th
Why are the Democrats willing to go to any measure to pass health care? It’s all about Statism. Nothing else can explain Obama’s obsession with this bill. The President sold this bill as a way to reduce our debt entitlement, lower health care costs and reduce premiums. The bill does none of these things. It doesn’t even come close and the President is still willing to do anything, even jamming it through the Senate via the partisan reconciliation process. Passing the bill is a certain calamity in the short term for Democrats. This is suicide voting at its finest. Democrats are willing to lose in the short term because once health care becomes an entitlement in the minds of the American people the Statists win. Mark Steyn wrote an article over the weekend that is essential in understanding what the liberal end game is on this issue.
It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make limited government all but impossible. In most of the rest of the Western world, there are still nominally “conservative” parties, and they even win elections occasionally, but not to any great effect. (Let’s not forget that Jacques Chirac was, in French terms, a “conservative.”) The result is a kind of two-party one-party state:
Right-of-center parties will once in a while be in office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast left-wing bureaucracies that cruise on regardless. Republicans seem to have difficulty grasping this basic dynamic.
This already exists. Think about entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security. Both of these programs are unsustainable. Reforming these programs is extremely difficult, and scrapping them all-together and starting over is an impossibility. The right has capitulated and the left has an entitlement that moves the nation further from limited government.
The Democrats’ answer for every problem is more government. If Obama said today: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country” it would be hilarious. The President certainly doesn’t believe it and neither does his party. Government dependency can be the only reason that the Democrats are so determined to pass a bill that a majority of Americans do not want. Either way the House votes on this bill is bad for the Democrats in the short term; however, if ObamaCare does pass the repeal movement may ultimately be more devastating to Democrats than Obama’s fragile ego if he fails to deliver.
Time: Please Quit Worrying Now
Mar 8th
Remember how news outlets on the left lamented every single day about deficits under the Bush administration? Now that Obama is in the Oval Office the days of worry are over. It’s simply amazing how Time whores itself out trying to defend the government when there’s a Democrat in the White House. Today Time has an article by Zachary Karabell defending debt.
Worrying about debt is like gaining too much weight and worrying about the size of your clothing. America’s indebtedness would be sustainable and even healthy if the underlying economy were vibrant, innovative and strong and if federal and state governments could channel those moneys productively and quickly. The problem isn’t how much debt we’re carrying today; it’s whether the economy of tomorrow will be able to justify it.
Karabell goes even further suggestion that we should be “investing” more or in other words spending more money. While I agree with some of what Karabell has to say it would have been more applicable four years ago. Simply hoping the dollar remains strong and that interest rates stay low is not a recipe for maintaining a lot of debt.
Fake but Accurate: Pentagon Shooting Coverage
Mar 5th
The mainstream press’ coverage of the gunman in the Pentagon shooting has been predictable. Every time some anarchist attacks someone or something they’re labeled as right-wing extremists. These so-called journalists don’t even bother to dig a little to get to the truth. For example, the IRS incident involved a deranged man who bashed Bush and quoted from the Communist Manifesto. Check out the Christian Science Monitor’s coverage of the Pentagon shooting.
John Patrick Bedell, whom authorities identified as the gunman in the Pentagon shooting on Thursday, appears to have been a right-wing extremist with virulent antigovernment feelings.
If so, that would make the Pentagon shooting the second violent extremist attack on a federal building within the past month. On Feb. 18, Joseph Stack flew a small aircraft into an IRS building in Austin, Texas. Mr. Stack left behind a disjointed screed in which, among other things, he expressed his hatred of the government.
“Appeared” is the key word because right-wing extremists aren’t registered Democrats. Right-wing extremists don’t post anti-Bush tirades all over the internet and they’re certainly not Truthers. Allahpundit over at Hot Air sums it up all very nicely.
Is it possible to be a “left-wing extremist” anymore or do nuts who embrace some lefty ideas before launching an attack automatically fall under the broader heading of “anti-government,” a term that’s conveniently also used to describe conservatives’ opposition to statism? That’s why CSM ended up labeling him a right-winger, I suspect. Righties want a smaller federal government and Bedell hated the military and the military’s part of the federal government. Voila!
It seems the mainstream press lives by the Dan Rather creed. It doesn’t matter what the truth is anymore. The news is fake but accurate.
Where’s My Bailout?
Mar 3rd
I suppose this will be the Climate Change Project Manager's office. Nice six-figure BS job if you can get it.
With the economy still in the tank and unemployment continuing to hover around ten percent, a lot of people are starting to wonder, “Where’s my bailout?” Well, if you look at the salary and employment stats in the public sector (city, county, state and federal government) you’ll see exactly where your bailout went.
Your bailout – or at least your hard-earned tax dollars that are partially funding the corporate fat-cat bailouts (the other portion being financed by the Chinese, among others) – is also being used to create make-work six-figure nonsense jobs, such as Climate Change Program Manager at the National Park Service. This ridiculous job, with a pay scale between $103,000 and $155,000, is just the tip of the iceberg (pun intended). According to the Dec. 11, 2009 edition of USA Today:
Federal employees making salaries of $100,000 or more jumped from 14% to 19% of civil servants during the recession’s first 18 months — and that’s before overtime pay and bonuses are counted. Federal workers are enjoying an extraordinary boom time — in pay and hiring — during a recession that has cost 7.3 million jobs in the private sector… When the recession started, the Transportation Department had only one person earning a salary of $170,000 or more. Eighteen months later, 1,690 employees had salaries above $170,000.
Moreover, the New York Times reported in August of 2009 that while the private sector lost 6.9 million jobs, state and local governments added 110,000 new jobs. All of this data – and it goes on and on and on, if you care to look into it – strikes me as horribly backwards.
I’m no economist, but if deficits are skyrocketing and companies are looking for relief so they can begin hiring again, wouldn’t logic dictate that government cut jobs, siphoning those people into the private sector, while providing tax incentives to individuals and private sector companies?
In December of 2009, 382,758 federal employees were making $100,000 or more annually. That’s more than $38 billion in what is largely bureaucratic largesse. Last I checked it’s the private sector that actually produces our GDP, not government jobs that essentially produce nothing. That’s a lot of nothing we’re getting for our billions.
Why we’re headed down the same road as western Europe, California, Massachusetts, New York, etc., etc., which ultimately leads to economic crisis and bankruptcy, I’ll never know. Or, maybe I do know…
It’s all about power and payoffs. The more the private sector and citizens cede to the state, the more power and money that’s funneled to the state and its dependants. It’s simple mathematics with the additional wild card of human nature (it’s corrupt, by the way).
While some see this as a Utopian system, rational people recognize that an all-powerful, controlling state destroys liberty and freedom. The explosive growth of public sector payrolls and jobs is simply another data point in a trend line that shows America headed toward the abyss. If you’re not concerned about it, you should be.
The Ego Has Landed
Mar 3rd
They're coming to take Obama away...
Win or lose the President has lost face during the health care debate. In a year of economic woe the President has been on a crusade to strengthen the grip of government on the citizens through a health care takeover. With an approving nod he has sat and watched his party make backroom deals and shut out the minority. This is the President and party that promised transparency. This is the president that opposed a “50-plus-one approach to governance.” Wow, how whatever happened to Hope and Change? Now with health care in its eleventh hour President Obama has supposedly made his last ditch pitch to pass a bill, a bill that everyone agrees is terrible.
President Barack Obama urged Congress Wednesday to vote “up or down” on sweeping health care legislation in the next few weeks, endorsing a plan that denies Senate Republicans the right to kill the bill by stalling with a filibuster. “I don’t see how another year of negotiations would help. Moreover, the insurance companies aren’t starting over,” Obama said, rejecting Republican calls to begin anew on an effort to remake the health care system.
There’s a real chance a bipartisan reform could pass, but the President is too “progressive” and too partisan for it to ever happen. Obama loves to remind everyone the “he won” the election and “his time doesn’t count.” People used to called this type of behavior by Bush as arrogant. What is it when Obama does it? Obama’s idea of bipartisanship is to shut up and agree with the White House. If Obama doesn’t change his attitude the American people won’t forget come 2012. Americans are growing tired of the arrogant faux intellectual who promised to be president of the United States, not only the progressive left.
The Nanny State: Cell Pones
Mar 3rd
It’s fascinating to me that people are so concerned about cell phones being linked to brain cancer. Cell phones have been around now for 20 years and have been even more common in the past decade. I’m not trying to downplay the risk, but there are certainly things Americans do every day that cause cancer. The state of Maine wants to put warning labels on phones, kind of like cigarettes.
Ignoring the health risks of heavy cell phone use invites a cancer epidemic, supporters of a bill requiring manufacturers to put labels on mobile phones and packaging said Tuesday.”We can do nothing and wait for the body count. That’s what happened with smoking” before warnings on cigarette packs were mandated, David Carpenter, director of the Institute for Health and Environment at the University of Albany, told Maine lawmakers.
There has been no study that definitively links cell phone use to brain tumors. These lawmakers are basically cherry picking studies. Cancer is a major problem and there are many common cancers that are caused by diet and lifestyle choices. Obviously, lawmakers in Maine do not have anything better to do with their time than chase imaginary problems (seems like the perfect case for the Butter Police). David Carpenter should be ashamed of himself and his statement above. To compare cell phones to cigarettes is not only intellectually dishonest it’s a repugnant form of scaremongering. Carpenter is another fine example of academia gone wild.
Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act
Mar 1st
I haven’t been paying close attention to the Akaka bill in the House because I didn’t think that something so stupid could pass. However, I often underestimate the stupidity of the Democratic Party. In 1959, 94.3% of Hawaiian voters cast ballots in favor of statehood. Now, 50 years later, this bill basically creates two states based on race. The governor of Hawaii is opposed to the bill that basically adds up to a 1.4 million-acre land grab. Gail Heriot and Peter Kirsanow have an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that explains how dangerous the bill is for the rest of the United States.
First, the Akaka bill privileges what is in fact a race, not a tribe. The very act of transforming a racial group into a tribal group confers a privilege on one race and not others and is thus unconstitutional. Second, while the Constitution implicitly gives the federal government the power to recognize tribes with a long and continuous history of separate self-governance, it does not give the power to confer sovereignty on new tribes, or to reconstitute a tribe whose members have long since become part of the mainstream culture.
The ideas behind the bill could end up in a slippery slope where new tribes are declared all over the country. What’s to stop this from happening? People always follow the money. What I don’t understand is why the Democrats are supporting this bill.