The Value Added Tax: A Hidden New Tax to Finance Much Bigger Government

This Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation video explains why a value-added tax would be a dangerous money machine for big government. The evidence from Europe also shows that VATs actually lead to higher income taxes. www.freedomandprosperity.org

Carville sees conservatives as alien creatures

By Byron York | October 20, 2009 | Washington Examiner
Are you, by chance, a conservative? A Republican? Did you vote for John McCain last November, as well as the GOP candidate in your local congressional race?

If your answer to these question is yes, then you are very, very strange -- and perhaps not even fully American. At the very least, you're not one of the rest of us.

If you don't believe it, just read "The Very Separate World of Conservative Republicans," a new report by Democracy Corps, the political research firm run by Democratic operatives James Carville and Stanley Greenberg.

"The self-identifying conservative Republicans who make up the base of the Republican Party stand a world apart from the rest of America," write Carville and Greenberg. Conservative Republicans, according to the Democracy Corps research, don't trust Barack Obama; are scared by the speed with which the president and Democrats in Congress are attempting to enact new programs; don't like government takeovers of business; and believe that many of their fellow Americans don't fully appreciate the threat posed by the Democratic agenda.

read more

Gregg: U.S. could be on path to a 'banana republic' situation

WASHINGTON (CNN) – A leading fiscal mind on Capitol Hill and a one-time Obama Cabinet pick sounded the alarm Sunday over the projected long-term financial challenges the country faces.

(2:25) “This deficit is driven by us,” New Hampshire Republican Sen. Judd Gregg candidly said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union when asked about the federal government’s projected $1.42 trillion operating deficit for the 2009 fiscal year.

“You talk about systemic risk. The systemic risk today is the Congress of the United States,“ the Ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee told CNN Chief National Correspondent John King, “that we’re creating these massive debts which we’re passing on to our children. We’re going to undermine fundamentally the quality of life for our children by doing this.”

“Now you can’t blame that on [former President] George [W.] Bush,” Greg said, noting that using the Obama administration’s projections the budget deficit for the next ten years is $1 trillion per year. And Gregg said that during the same ten-year period, public debt as a percentage of gross domestic product would increase from 40 percent - which Gregg called “tolerable but still too high” - up to 80 percent.

(2:50) The figures, Gregg told King, “mean we’re basically on the path to a banana-republic-type of financial situation in this country. And you just can’t do that. You can’t keep running these [federal] programs out [into the future] and not paying for them. And you can’t keep throwing debt on top of debt.”

“Standards of living will drop if we keep this up,” Gregg also said.

Another Mao-quoting Obama Czar in the White House

Tuesday, October 20, 2009, 5:06 AM | Jim Hoft

Naked Emperor News
Ron Bloom is the Manufacturing Czar. In the video he admits, “We kind of agree with Mao that power comes largely from the barrel of a gun.”
Doesn’t that make you feel secure?

So who is Ron Bloom?
Jammie Wearing Fool wrote this about the former SEIU negotiator:

The name Ron Bloom is one that we need to start paying attention to. He has a long history of being the negotiating face of unions in a suit. He is a Harvard Business School graduate who has worked for the unions beginning with SEIU for decades. The most recent union he represented was the United Steel Workers (USW) before becoming a part of the automotive team that Obama put together. You know the one that had the head Steven Rattner having to resign over some questions about his personal finances mixed in with a little fraudulent money gifts.Rattner was replaced by Ron Bloom, and voila the United Auto Workers (UAW), got a sweetheart deal backed up by the power of the federal government to try and stave off bankruptcy.

Barack Obama may not know anything about economics but he is an expert on radicalism.
We know that.

Senate health reform bill S. 1796 weighs in at 1,502 pages

October 19, 2009 | Politico

Read the entire 1,502 pages of the Finance bill.

Read a document outlining the concerns of Sens. Kerry, Schumer, Menendez, Stabenow and Rockefeller that the tax on high-end plans will hit plans that are not overly generous.

Read Sen. Rockefeller's expanded views on reform.

UPDATE 2: The Senate Finance Committee filed its sweeping health care reform bill Monday and its release served largely to highlight the divisions among Democrats over the direction of reform.

The massive, 1,500 page bill is expected to serve as the backbone for Democratic reform efforts going forward and five senators expressed concerns about one of its main provisions, a 40 percent tax on high-end insurance plans.

The tax is designed to pay for reform and lower costs by making the so-called Cadillac plans less attractive for insurers to offer. Under the bill, a plan that costs an individual more than $8,000 and a family more than $21,000 annually would be subject to the tax.

But Democratic Sens. John Kerry, Chuck Schumer, Robert Menendez, Debbie Stabenow and Jay Rockefeller are concerned that the threshold that defines a Cadillac plan is too low and will whack middle-class people.

“We remain concerned that the thresholds are too low and will impact plans that are not overly generous and that in 2019 far too many plans will be impacted by the excise tax. We plan to continue to work with Chairman Baucus on this issue to ensure that provision bends the cost curve, but not at the expense of middle-income Americans,” the senators wrote in a one-page “additional views” document that was released with the bill.

The document is reminiscent of a dissent that is filed with the majority opinion in a court case.

Rockefeller filed his own 13-page additional views document that spelled out his concerns, many of which he aired during the eight-day mark up of the bill. The West Virginia Democrat remains concerns that the bill does not contain a public option; that it does not uniformly apply insurance market reforms and that state-based exchanges designed to help people buy insurance will not be as effective as a single national one.

UPDATE 3: It's important to remember that the bill won't exist in this form for long. Senate Majority Leader Reid and Sens. Max Baucus and Chris Dodd along with senior White House aides are merging the Finance and Health Committee legislation into one bill that will be considered on the floor of the Senate. The behind-closed-doors dealings have drawn criticism from Republicans, particularly because President Obama had promised a transparent process and pledged to negotiate the health care bill on C-SPAN.

Obama: I'm Busy With My Socialist Mop

A Portrait in Frustration

(Washington Post - Oct. 7) -- President Obama is having another meeting with his national security team on Wednesday, in the super-secure White House situation room, to try to figure out what to do about Afghanistan. Judging from the team photo from last week's meeting, it doesn't promise to be much fun.
enlarge photo

Karl Rove discusses Afghanistan and the sit-room photo shown above (he says it's highly unusual to have Gibbs and Axlerod in the meeting).

Does Obama's communications chief know the bloody truth about Chairman Mao?

By Mark Tapscott | 10/17/09 8:23 AM EDT | Washington Examiner

President Obama's acting chief White House communications advisor, Anita Dunn has been much in the headlines of late, owing to her comments during a CNN interview last week branding Fox News as an arm of the Republican Party.

Interestingly, Dunn delivered a commencement address in June in which she named Mao Tse Sung, the genocidal founder of Communist China, as one of her "two favorite philosophers," with the other, she chirpily noted, being Mother Teresa.

Mao and Mother Teresa are, Dunn explained, "the two people that I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point, which is to say you are going to make choices, you are going to challenge, you are going to say why not." She then quoted an alleged Mao statement about winning the Chinese civil war his way: "You fight your war and I will fight mine."

She could as easily have encouraged the newly minted college graduates to take inspiration from Frank Sinatra's memorable pop hit, "My Way." At least Sinatra was not a genocidal killer of millions, as was Mao, which is what make Dunn's choice of heroes so utterly perplexing.

read more

First They Came for Fox News…

October 19th, 2009 1:11 am | The Rosett Report



You don’t have to love Fox News to see how dangerous it is when the President of the United States gives his staff and advisers a green light to single out and denigrate by name a specific news organization. As we surely all know by now, this is what the White House has been doing to Fox.

The Sunday morning talk shows just brought us White House Senior Adviser David Axelrod opining to George Stephanopoulos, on ABC’s “This Week,” that Fox is “Really – not news — it’s pushing a point of view.” Axelrod advised that ABC and other non-Fox outlets take his cue and expunge Fox from the brethren of news services: “And the bigger thing is that other news organizations like yours ought not to treat them that way, and we’re not going to treat them that way.”



Meanwhile, on CNN’s “State of the Union,” White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel was hammering home the same message, that Fox “is not a news organization so much as it has a perspective,” and urging “More importantly is not have [sic] the CNNs and the others in the world basically be led in following Fox, as if what they’re trying to do is a legitimate news organization… .”

read more

Obama to issue new marijuana policy

Oct 19, 8:07 AM (ET) | My Way | AP

WASHINGTON (AP) - Federal drug agents won't pursue pot-smoking patients or their sanctioned suppliers in states that allow medical marijuana, under new legal guidelines to be issued Monday by the Obama administration.

Two Justice Department officials described the new policy to The Associated Press, saying prosecutors will be told it is not a good use of their time to arrest people who use or provide medical marijuana in strict compliance with state law.

The guidelines to be issued by the department do, however, make it clear that agents will go after people whose marijuana distribution goes beyond what is permitted under state law or use medical marijuana as a cover for other crimes, the officials said.

The new policy is a significant departure from the Bush administration, which insisted it would continue to enforce federal anti-pot laws regardless of state codes.

Fourteen states allow some use of marijuana for medical purposes: Alaska, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington.

read the whole thing