Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Barker's Newsbites: Tuesday, February 14, 2012


Two Steak & Cheese subs... mushrooms... provolone AND mozzarella... $15

Relaxing at home with the one I love... PRICELESS!

(*WINK*)
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8 comments:

William R. Barker said...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obamas-budget-calls-for-pay-raises-federal-workforce-size-would-remain-flat/2012/02/13/gIQAyEiDDR_story.html

President Obama wants to give raises to people collecting federal paychecks...

(*ROLLING MY EYES*)

The budget also calls for federal workers to increase their contribution to their retirement program by 1.2% over three years.

* HOW'BOUT INCREASING THEIR "CONTRIBUTION" BY 12% OVER ONE YEAR?

“A permanent pay freeze is neither sustainable nor desirable,” Obama’s proposal said.

* WHO SAID ANYTHING ABOUT "PERMANENT?" HOW ABOUT JUST TILL ELECTED OFFICIALS GIVE US A BALANCED BUDGET!?

During the two-year freeze, which Obama ordered in late 2010, eligible federal employees have received within-grade step increases for advancing through levels of the General Schedule pay system.

* MEANING NOTHING WAS ACTUALLY FROZEN; TYPICAL OBAMA BULLSHIT.

Federal employees and union leaders expressed tepid support for the pay raise Monday, noting as they often do that lower pay levels could deter potential applicants from seeking federal employment or encourage current workers to look for jobs in the private sector.

* OFF YA GO! SOUNDS GOOD TO ME!

February 14, 2012 at 11:36 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/story/2012-02-10/pew-study-inaccurate-voter-registration-rolls/53083406/1

More than 24 million voter-registration records in the United States - about one in eight - are inaccurate, out-of-date or duplicates.

Nearly 2.8 million people are registered in two or more states, and perhaps 1.8 million registered voters are dead.

(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)

Experts say there's no evidence that the errors lead to fraud on Election Day.

(*SMIRK*)

* FOLKS... THAT'S BULLSHIT. GO THROUGH THE ARCHIVES OF USUALLY RIGHT AND YOU'LL READ STORY AFTER STORY OF VOTER FRAUD.

* FOLKS... JFK "WON" THE 1960 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION THANKS TO VOTER FRAUD IN ILLINOIS. (*SHRUG*)

February 14, 2012 at 11:42 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/108171

* BY JUDGE RICHARD A. A. EPSTEIN

Just what allows the feds to order individual firms to supply goods for free simply because government officials believe that these services are essential?

* NOTHING. NOTHING AT ALL. THE WORD FOR SUCH BEHAVIOR IS "TYRANNY."

The proper procedure for distributing "free" goods...is by way of taxation, which requires the Congress to step up to the plate to make the necessary fiscal appropriations.

February 14, 2012 at 12:06 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/290988/ball-four-editors

President Obama’s fourth budget promises a fourth straight year of trillion-dollar deficits, a fourth straight year of masking new spending with lame gimmickry, and a fourth straight year of asking Congress to yoke the American people with a historically massive tax hike.

It [envisions spending] a staggering $47 trillion over ten years and capitulates to the inevitability of a national debt larger than the national economy, assuring that by 2022 our interest payments alone will reach $1 trillion a year.

It is a budget that hikes income, estate, and other taxes by $1.9 trillion over ten years, and uses that revenue not to reduce the deficit or shore up our existing entitlement commitments but on a raft of new "stimuli" that are as substantively dubious as they are politically opportunistic.

It is a budget that claims $4 trillion in [false] deficit reduction through a series of cheap tricks that don’t stand up to even the gentlest of scrutiny. Fully half of the savings come from the administration’s claiming as its own the $2 trillion in cuts won by congressional Republicans in the debt-limit deal. Some $850 billion comes from not spending war dollars that were never going to be spent anyway. Another $430 billion comes from jury-rigging the baseline to hide the cost of the infamous Medicare “doc fix.” And so on.

(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD IN DISGUST*)

Speaking of Medicare, this budget expands the mandate of the proto-rationing body known as the Independent Payment Advisory Board, tightening the gurney straps on seniors by targeting a Medicare growth rate even lower than the one in ObamaCare and empowering the unelected body with “additional tools” such as the “ability to consider value-based benefit design.”

(Translation: IPAB will continue to squeeze the same health-care providers Medicare’s chief actuary has predicted will leave the market in droves in the coming decade, and will get around being prohibited to change patient benefits by calling those changes by a fancier name.)

Even with all these gambits and intrigues, this is a budget that relies on sunny economic assumptions. Its revenue projections assume GDP growth more robust than those of the nonpartisan CBO, and there is little reason to think the White House’s projections are soberer.

(To wit: President Obama’s first budget projected 2010–2012 annual deficits of $1.17 trillion, $912 billion, and $581 billion, respectively. The actual deficits for those years were $1.29 trillion, $1.3 trillion, and (a projected) $1.33 trillion.)

In February of 2009, the president vowed “to cut the deficit we inherited in half by the end of my first term in office” by making “difficult decisions” and facing “challenges we’ve long neglected,” so that our children wouldn’t be left “with a debt they cannot repay.”

But the man who promised to cut annual deficits in half has fallen wildly short of that mark.

The man who promised difficult decisions has made none; the man who promised to stand foursquare against challenges long neglected has instead carried that neglect into the last year of his term - and, with any justice, the last year of his presidency.

* AMEN.

February 14, 2012 at 12:21 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.creators.com/conservative/walter-williams.html

The Philadelphia Inquirer's big story Feb. 4 was about how a budget crunch at the Philadelphia School District had caused the district to lay off 91 school police officers.

* AND YET...

Over the years, there's been no discussion of what has happened to our youth that makes a school police force necessary in the first place.

(*NOD*)

The Inquirer's series "Assault on Learning" (March 2011) reported that in the 2010 school year, "690 teachers were assaulted; in the last five years, 4,000 were."

The newspaper reported that in Philadelphia's 268 schools, "on an average day 25 students, teachers, or other staff members were beaten, robbed, sexually assaulted, or victims of other violent crimes [and] that doesn't even include thousands more who are extorted, threatened, or bullied in a school year."

(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)

* FOLKS... FOR ALL INTENTS AND PURPOSES PHILLY ISN'T REALLY AN AMERICAN CITY ANYMORE.

I graduated from Philadelphia's Benjamin Franklin High School in 1954.

Franklin's students were from the poorest North Philadelphia neighborhoods — such as the Richard Allen housing project, where I lived — but there were no policemen patrolling the hallways. There were occasional after-school fights — rumbles, we called them — but within the school, there was order. Students didn't use foul language to teachers, much less assault them.

How might one explain the greater civility of Philadelphia and other big-city, predominantly black schools during earlier periods compared with today?

* FOLKS... READ THE FULL ESSAY TO GET THE ANSWER.

February 14, 2012 at 4:44 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://freebeacon.com/obama-spend-it-now/

President Obama on Monday unveiled the most expensive White House budget request in United States history...

(*SARCASTIC CLAP-CLAP-CLAP*)

Despite pledging in 2009 to cut the federal deficit in half by the end of his first term, the president’s budget in fact...plans to spend a total of $47 trillion over the next decade, adding a cumulative $6.7 trillion to the federal budget deficit.

(*HEADACHE*)

Under Obama’s proposal, federal spending will rise from $3.8 trillion in 2013 to $5.8 trillion in 2022, an increase of 53%.

* FOLKS... (*THROWING MY HANDS UP IN MOOT FRUSTRATION*)

If enacted, the White House plan would increase the debt held by the public—the amount owed by American taxpayers—from $12.6 trillion to $19.4 trillion over that same period, a 54% increase.

As a share of GDP, the public debt is projected to increase from 74.2% to 76.5% by the end of the 10-year budget window.

* AMERICA'S GREATEST ENEMY SITS IN THE OVAL OFFICE. IT IS THAT SIMPLE.

While campaign for president in 2008, Obama said that the $4 trillion in debt accumulated under President George W. Bush was “irresponsible” and “unpatriotic.”

* WASN'T OBAMA A U.S. SENATOR...??? HOW MUCH OF THIS IRRESPONSIBLE AND UNPATRIOTIC SPENDING DID HE VOTE FOR?

(*SMIRK*)

* INDEED... HOW MANY TIMES DID THEN-SENATOR OBAMA VOTE FOR EVEN HIGHER SPENDING THAN ASKED FOR BY PRESIDENT BUSH? HMM...???

* BOTTOM LINE... (KEEP READING!)

According to White House projections, by the end of his first term in office President Obama will have added $5.7 trillion to the national debt, more than any president in history.

Obama’s budget calls for more than $350 billion in new "stimulus" spending...

The CBO estimates that by 2022 federal spending on Medicare alone will reach $1 trillion.

* AS WILL INTEREST ON THE NATIONAL DEBT...

(*SIGH*)

* WE ARE SO FUCKED, PEOPLE... (*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)

February 14, 2012 at 5:19 PM
William R. Barker said...

* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)

http://www.redstate.com/erick/2012/02/14/today-house-republicans-are-set-to-approve-barack-obamas-latest-stimulus-plan/

It is sad that we have gotten here, but House Republicans, including conservative stalwarts like Jim Jordan of Ohio, are set to pass Barack Obama’s latest stimulus plan. Except...

(*SMRIRK*)

...they are calling it John Boehner’s “Highway Bill.”

(*RUEFUL CHUCKLE*)

Consider, however that Barack Obama’s budget, unveiled yesterday, calls for much of the same infrastructure spending the House Republicans want.

There is a reason the Heritage Action for America, Club for Growth, Competitive Enterprise Institute, and other conservative organizations are opposed to this spending spree. It is not conservative. It should not be Republican. It is Barack Obama style spending.

(Call your Congressman today at 202-224-3121 and tell him to oppose H.R. 7, the American Energy & Infrastructure Jobs Act.)

Consider first that this highway bill “expands domestic energy production and puts in place a long-term plan for America’s infrastructure that is controlled by the states and completely paid for –without raising the gas tax.”

* WHY, THAT SOUNDS GOOD, DOESN'T IT? YET...

Why would a highway bill focus on energy production?

* YEAH! WHY WOULD A HIGHWAY BILL FOCUS ON ENERGY PRODUCTION...?!?!

Well, first because it is called a sweetener designed to woo conservatives to vote for it.

* AH...

Second because “the gas tax does not generate enough revenue to meet all the infrastructure needs in America.”

(*PURSED LIPS*)

* TO BE CONTINUED...

February 14, 2012 at 5:34 PM
William R. Barker said...

* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)

There you have it. Instead of opening up American land to energy production and using that energy production to pay down the national debt, we will instead jack up highway spending, bankrupt the highway trust fund as a result, and then use the energy taxes to offset the project funding.

(*GRITTING MY TEETH*)

Oh, and even better, the House GOP has an accounting “score” that claims they won’t bankrupt the Highway Trust Fund.

How’s that?

Well, just like how Democrats took all the major budget busting provisions out of ObamaCare and put them in separate legislation so it looked like ObamaCare actually decreased the deficit, House Republicans have decided to take mass transit funding and pay for it out of the general fund of taxpayer dollars instead of paying for it out of the Highway Trust Fund.

* THOSE FUCKS! THOSE DIRTY FUCKS!

So it makes it look like the Highway Trust Fund won’t go bankrupt!

(Accounting gimmicks - they’re not just for socializing the American healthcare industry any more.)

[R]ewind the clock to just last July when Congressman John Mica (R-FL HAFA Score 66%) passed a highway spending bill out of his committee that spent no more than what the gas tax raised. In other words, House Republicans have taken us from being able to spend as much as the gas tax raised to bankrupting the Highway Trust Fund and requiring domestic energy production fees to offset the spending binge.

(*GNASHING MY TEETH*)

This is what smaller government looks like to House Republicans.

DIE, BOEHNER, DIE!

Even worse...we learn “Currently, only about two-thirds of federal highway dollars go back to the states for them to control. Under this bill, it will be 93%. What’s more, for the first time in three decades, ALL of the gas tax revenue – the user fee paid by every motorist on the highways – will go to core highway programs.”

The first question is if we can get to 93%, why not 100% and get Congress out of the business of dictating local and state highway projects?

(*CLAP-CLAP-CLAP*)

But more so, note that all of the gas tax revenue will go to core highway programs. All of it. And Congress will keep spending beyond all the gas tax revenue.

* BEYOND...!!!

This is madness.

This is Barack Obama style "stimuli" and Barack Obama style accounting.

The House Republicans are relying on five year estimates of revenues generated from energy production to hide just how bankrupt they will leave the Highway Trust Fund with this spending binge. And in five years, none of us will be surprised when reality comes in less than the estimates.

* IF JOHN BOEHNER WERE TO BE ASSASSINATED I'D THROW A FRIGG'N PARTY!

February 14, 2012 at 5:35 PM

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