A couple of weeks before Gov. Jay Nixon vetoed House Bill 253, the dangerous bill that would give wealthy Missourians a tax cut while starving education and other important state services....You know they're upset when they don't even wait a few lines of text before the appeals to emotion.
Mr. Perry likes to brag about his state's lack of an income tax. Never mind that he had nothing to do with it, and that the state's wealth of oil and gas reserves make such a tax unnecessary.Er, I'm pretty sure his not having anything to do with it is irrelevant. I'm also pretty sure Perry never took all the credit for it. Whatever his faults, he doesn't claim to be responsible for all that is right with the world. I mean, he's not Al Gore.
Let’s interrupt today’s article about Obamacare and instead talk about Syria, rather briefly. Here are my impressions. Please share yours in the comments:(1) This is again a Western country attacking an Arab country. In the past, the left has screamed that this is what inspires Islamic terrorism. So why has Obama attacked Syria and Libya and illegally bombed the crap out of people in Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia? Secret Muslim my Ramadanadingdong.Finally, I should point out that the Magic Syrian never appeared... just as I told you it won't: LINK.
(2) There is no endgame here. The rebels are even worse than the regime. The ideal solution would be for a Syrian-sized asteroid to crash gently on the country. Guess we shouldn’t have cut NASA’s budget, should we Mr. Obama?
(3) The Europeans are spent when it comes to war. Their ten soldiers are too tired after Afghanistan and won’t be out of therapy for decades. So we’re going this one alone except for possibly Turkey, and letting Turkey in raises questions of a larger regional struggle.
(4) The public hates the idea of getting involved. That last good poll I saw on this showed 9% support for intervention... about the same number of people who think Superman is real.
(5) There is a chance that any violence will spark a larger war with Israel. Iran is talking about using Syria as a pretext to attack Israel, though I highly doubt this. Cojones is a Spanish word and they don’t speak Spanish in Iran, which means they ain’t got no cojones in Iran.
“She has more sooty baggage than a 90-car freight train. And what exactly has she ever accomplished – beyond bullishly covering for her philandering husband?”She also slams Hillary for failing in the one instance where she actually had some authority, i.e. Benghazi, though her criticism does strike me as a little off in this regard – she says Hillary should have resigned, which seems politically unrealistic. In any event, it’s interesting to see a liberal point out that the Empress has no pantsuit.
“Oh, feminism is still alive? Thanks for the tip! It sure is invisible, except for the random whine from some maleducated product of the elite schools who’s found a plush berth in glossy magazines.”That is exactly right. The feminism Rush called “Femi-nazis,” which was born in the 1960s and peaked when it dominated academia, Hollywood and the nation’s universities in the 1990s is dead except for a couple random whiners, and the ideology it constructed has been abandoned. I love this quote in particular: “They keep dusting Steinem off and trotting her out to pin awards on her, but she’s the walking dead.”
“While it’s a big relief not to have feminist bullies sermonizing from every news show anymore, the leadership vacuum is alarming. It’s very distressing, for example, that the atrocities against women in India — the shocking series of gang rapes, which seem never to end — have not been aggressively condemned in a sustained way by feminist organizations in the U.S. . . The true mission of feminism today is not to carp about the woes of affluent Western career women but to turn the spotlight on life-and-death issues affecting women in the Third World.”Paglia doesn’t specifically connect this dot to partisanship, but that is the logical cause of what she notes. Since feminists have aligned themselves with the Democratic Party and since the Democratic Party has aligned itself with “people of color” against white males, Christians, and the West, it goes against party politics to criticize things like Muslim atrocities or to point out that the rest of the world is a racist, sexist sh*thole. Hence, feminists have remained deafeningly silent about various atrocities as they instead focused their energies on things like getting healthplans to pay for condoms for rich girls. Because of this, feminists have squandered their credibility because it’s clear they are no longer about “women,” they are about “Democrats,” just like unions are no longer about workers, they are about Democrats.
(1) For whatever reason, people keep missing the fact that 6 million people have already lost their insurance because of Obamacare. When he started in 2010, 43 million people had no insurance, now it’s 49 million... and that’s despite more kids being added to parents’ policies, so the numbers are actually higher.● Non-Support for Shutdown: On the shutdown front, as Tea Party groups start running ads attacking Republicans as “chickens” (seriously... welcome to grade school) for not shutting down the government, the Republicans have commissioned a poll to find out how much support a shutdown actually has. The results are pretty interesting:
(2) People with individual plans started losing those plans early because Obamacare imposes new requirements which prevent most individual plans, which typically have high deductibles, from counting as Obamacare compliant.
(3) Then small employers started dumping their plans. Surprise, it’s cheaper to pay a couple hundred dollar fine than $10k a year to cover an employee, and with the Exchanges as an alternative, there was no moral reason to keep offering insurance either. This also turned out to be a good way to break the unions.
(4) Employers everywhere soon started making people part-timers because then they don’t need to offer insurance and they don’t get fined. The BoL monthly jobs reports have shown this trend as full-time jobs keep vanishing as part-time jobs appear. Similarly, reports of employers switching to part-time hours have been coming from unions, universities, school systems, big firms like WalMart and dozens more. Not only does this mean less insurance, it will make it harder for poor people to earn a living... and then Obama fines them.
(4) Now they are dumping spouses from company policies. Obamacare requires employers to cover children of employees if they offer coverage, but it doesn’t say anything about spouses. The assumption was that employers wouldn’t do anything so dastardly. Well, they are. To save costs and to hopefully get employees to switch to other policies, employers are dropping spouses like the plague. UPS just announced that 15,000 spouses would be dumped. Delta has made similar noises, as have other large companies. Smaller companies have been doing this for a while now.
Other large companies are imposing a surcharge on spouses, which is also allowed. Right now, 14% of employers with more than 5,000 employees impose such a surcharge. Last year, the number was 4%.
Thank you, Obama! You’ve done a wonderful thing. Who are you going to hurt for your next trick?
● Self-identified “conservative Republicans” make up only 19% of the public. That’s consistent with what I’ve seen. I will add that they are also concentrated in the Southern states, though the poll doesn’t say that.What this tells us is as with immigration, the Republican base is much closer to the views of the public than they are the views of the talk radio base, even as the talk radio base claims to speak for the majority of Republicans. And in this case, both the base and the public overwhelming reject the idea of forcing a shutdown. That actually makes sense too. Right now, millions of people are learning the cost of liberalism as Obamacare ruins their insurance. Conservatives need to refrain from making conservatism less attractive than what they are experiencing from liberalism. Let Obamacare work its horrors and then step in with an alternate plan to replace it. Remember, you can’t save people until they know they need to be saved.
● Even among those self-identified “conservative Republicans,” only 9% self-identify as “very conservative” with the other 10% self-identifying as “somewhat conservative.” So forget any idea that talk radio is speaking for “the silent majority” or even the majority of Republicans. The talk radio base is about 9% of the public.
● Within self-identified “very conservative” ranks, 63% favor a shut down to try to defund Obamacare. However, these numbers flip for everyone else. Indeed, within “somewhat conservative” ranks, 62% oppose a shutdown. And when you look at the party as a whole, you find that only 37% favor a shutdown.
● Overall, only 23% of the public (which includes conservatives) favors a shutdown.
Men in Black is an excellent film. It was such an excellent film that it made a fortune, spawned a franchise, and has proved to have very strong staying power. What’s interesting about this film though, is that it is the perfect marriage of a tent-pole film with a cult film. Seriously.
“You know, you’re getting a better deal than other people...”That’s why they want you to know nothing at this point. Misinformation and confusion is part of the plan.
“You know, it wouldn’t cost much more to step up to a higher tier plan...”
“You know, if you leave that employer, you could get subsidies...”
“You know it’s a crime not to have insurance...”
“Why pay a fine and get nothing when you can pay just a little bit more and getnext to nothinginsurance...?”
“Into this void stepped Cruz, who made a bold attempt to rouse a ‘grassroots army’ for the cause of... defunding Obamacare. So instead of haranguing their members about unchecked immigration, hard core red-staters would harangue them about the Democrats’ health care plan.”Yep, it was all a RINO plot. Cruz distracted everyone so he didn’t have to talk about immigration. According to Kauss, the Democrats were “secretly delighted” by this because “with the Tea partiers distracted, fence-sitting Reps might have enough breathing room in the fall to sneak some kind of mass legalization through.” Of course, Kauss notes as an aside, it won’t actually appear to be legalization at the time, but the sneaky Republicans will pass something the Democrats can then turn into a path to citizenship when no one is looking, i.e. anything that gets passed is a trick.
● Virtually all psychologists believe there is an intelligence factor that explains the performance of individuals on cognitive tests, and IQ tests measure that factor.In other words, everything the media claims is false is actually true and media claims that the scientific community has reached a consensus that these things are false is backwards, as the consensus goes the other way. To prove the consensus, Richwine cites numerous books and studies and even a committee report by 52 experts from the American Psychological Association which noted the above; against these, he lines up quotes from hack journalists who say things like, “IQ is a metric of such dubiousness that almost no serious educational researcher uses it anymore.” (Ana Marie Cox -- The Guardian, May 2012).
● IQ scores correlate with educational attainment, income and other socioeconomic outcomes.
● A person's IQ score is influenced by their genetic make up and environmental factors. It tends to remain stable after adolescence.
● There is an observed difference in IQ scores among different racial/ethnic/gender groups, with northeast Asians scoring the highest, followed by whites, followed by Hispanics, followed by blacks.
● Psychologists have tested and rejected the notion that racial/gender differences are the result of biased testing. They have not, however, accepted the idea of a genetic cause for these differences because no link has yet been shown between DNA gene combinations and intelligence.
“For every [stinking child of an illegal] who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there that weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.”I’m not sure which part could have been misconstrued. Perhaps he meant “watermelons”?