Archive for the 'Barry's Broken Promises' Category

With the Holiday season, things have been pretty slow around here. This is certainly understandable, since we all have our familial duties this time of year. But someone has to get in the first post of 2010.

For me, Christmas means visiting with my parents and seeing the extended clan down in Virginia. This year, it also meant getting rid of snow on the side of the street in front of their house, and from on top of dad’s car. Various siblings had already shoveled their driveway. Meanwhile, I had cleared about 20 inches of snow from my sidewalk and car back in Maryland, and thus brought some recent experience to the task. Fortunately, the day was sunny, with temperatures above freezing, allowing me to leave some of the snow to melt away.
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Read this first.

Reaction??

Some things speak for themselves:

First:

President Obama is becoming a great disappointment, as the Democrats slowly dismantle Medicare and Medicaid.

…then:

And I am disappointed, hurt, worried, and depressed that the Democrats were the ones who got the cuts passed. I feel sure they wouldn’t have done so if Teddy Kennedy had been there. And Obama, what do you have to say for yourself? Were you sitting cozily in front of the fireplace too, watching a Walt Disney movie with your adorable daughters?

I smell a fox, in fact several. We are in a democracy; I accept that we don’t all agree. But I worked hard to get Obama elected. I have fought hard to encourage others to support health care reform, and to support Obama’s plan, and now I feel betrayed.

..and so on. There are many disappointed people. But who cares? They’re all old, or have some vested interest in our elderly.

Obama’s losing his mojo. If he keeps pissing people off, he’s going to be fired.

and the blog-mistress will be unhappy with me. Better get back to work around here before she notices I was gone…

A few links from around the ’sphere:

It looks like we’re running out of oil quicker than anticipated. Ofcourse, I’m sure there is no “green” agenda tied with this report. (/sarcasm) The good news is that Nissan has come out with an electric car that doesn’t come with a huge price tag (approximately $15,000 US) nor the condescending “Prius” attitude….

And they did it all without have Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, or Barack Obama mandating it. Funny. (Though one could argue that they are simply following the consumer trend being created by the continuing “green chic” movement throughout our society and promoted by our government.)

It looks like PETA is now taking on McDonald’s (complete with a video and cheesy, feel-good/feel-bad song). And they’re telling me to take action. Well, here is what I am going to do, I’m going to go and buy me a 10 piece Chicken McNugget for lunch, and maybe even for dinner.

Remember, when the going gets tough, and your popularity is sinking quickly, blame Bush. It seems to be the only ammunition the Democratic Party has left in their bag. And they’re going to attempt to milk it until, I am thinking, atleast the 2024 elections. I also have this strange feeling that it is ringing hollow and will start stinking of desperation soon…

And just when you thought that a single payer system was indeed the utopian vision Michael Moore portrayed it as, we get to see more rationing of health care in Great Britain’s NHS. Sure, you can get private care, for a relatively high price. I thought such a system would alleviate such high health costs. Remember this as our betters in D.C. continuously say their plan is going to lower costs and increase availability….

Obama and Company, in their own words:

And just before you think it is all bad… ten reasons why the American health care system isn’t as worse off as advertised by Obama and Co.

And how are we really going to pay for this. Try this broken promise on for size.

One other note. I am note sure how long ago you guys last read Orwell’s “1984″, but remember that “Big Brother” was always watching? Well, take a gander at the 2009 Great Britain.

because of crap like this:

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Tuesday that the health-care reform bill now pending in Congress would garner very few votes if lawmakers actually had to read the entire bill before voting on it.

“If every member pledged to not vote for it if they hadn’t read it in its entirety, I think we would have very few votes,” Hoyer told CNSNews.com at his regular weekly news conference.

Hoyer was responding to a question from CNSNews.com on whether he supported a pledge that asks members of the Congress to read the entire bill before voting on it and also make the full text of the bill available to the public for 72 hours before a vote.

In fact, Hoyer found the idea of the pledge humorous, laughing as he responded to the question. “I’m laughing because a) I don’t know how long this bill is going to be, but it’s going to be a very long bill,” he said.

Wonderful. Representatives no longer read the bills that they then vote on but are dependent on “staffers” to spoon feed them the Cliffs Notes version. What exactly do we play these no-talent a-clowns for again? The same reason there is no real “filibuster” anymore with everyone sitting there listening to one dude read the phone book, because our Representatives are lazy, money-grubbing politicians bent on their own selfish desires, or so it seems by their collective, single-minded behavior.
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Comparing Barack and President Sarkozy in their response to the Iran election fraud and subsequent coup d’état, were I the French parliament, I would pass a bill taking this:

and renaming it:

How far we have fallen…

David Hansen at NRO has painstakingly surveyed the movers and shakers of today’s media to give us a roundup of the start to our new queen’s reign. And it’s not a pretty picture folks, not pretty at all. Here’s the first review:

LET THEM EAT MOOSE
“Ted Stevens may have gotten off,” wrote Bob Herbert in the New York Times, “but he taught our Sarah something first — like using $100-a-pound beef for her state dinners. And what’s this $50 mil for her inauguration gala? Since when do you fly in your favorite pizza-maker from across the country on our dime? Or send the presidential 747 for a spin over the Big Apple for a third-of-a-million-dollar joyride? Does Palin think she’s still in Alaska and has to have everything flown in from the South 48 by jumbo jet?”

Read the rest here. But do put down that coffee mug first. (H/T)

Let’s catch up with how the Stimulus is working….

Eleven weeks after Congress settled on a stimulus package that provided $135 billion to limit layoffs in state governments, many states are finding that the funds are not enough and are moving to lay off thousands of public employees.

Well, as Susan Collins stated, the stimulus money was never meant to prop up state budgets to keep public employees working. Nope.

It’s about time states began de-bloating their payrolls of the many lazy, useless bureaucratic robots who suck the taxes of their servants (we the people) while being rude, nasty and snobbish and inefficient. Many of these jobs were never really necessary. Sadly it takes a bad economy for states to realize this, and rightfully make cuts. Downsize. I like to call it “rightsizing”…

Another article:

WASHINGTON (AP) - Counties suffering the most from job losses stand to receive the least help from President Barack Obama’s plan to spend billions of stimulus dollars on roads and bridges, an Associated Press analysis has found.

Although the intent of the money is to put people back to work, AP’s review of more than 5,500 planned transportation projects nationwide reveals that states are planning to spend the stimulus in communities where jobless rates are already lower.

Oh this is classic…

The very promise that Obama made, to spend money quickly and create jobs, is locking out many struggling communities needing those jobs.

The money goes to projects ready to start. But many struggling communities don’t have projects waiting on a shelf. They couldn’t afford the millions of dollars for preparation and plans that often is required.

“It’s not fair,” said Martin Schuller, the borough manager in the Elk County seat of Ridgway, who commiserates about the inequity in highway aid with colleagues in nearby towns. “It’s a joke because we’re not going to get it, because we don’t have any projects ready to go.”

The early trend seen in the AP analysis runs counter to expectations raised by Obama, that road and infrastructure money from the historic $787 billion stimulus plan would create jobs in areas most devastated by layoffs and plant closings. Transportation money, he said, would mean paychecks for “folks looking for work” and “folks who want to work.”

“That’s the core of my plan, putting people to work doing the work that America needs done,” Obama said in a Feb. 11 speech promoting transportation spending as a way to expand employment.

:jobs:

I hold the Obama administration totally responsible for this. He’s the one who promised the stimulus would CREATE and SAVE jobs for AMERICANS on needed infrastructure work. He’s teh MAN you know…who keeps a watchful eye on how this money is being spent and who makes sure it’s not wasted. Yep.

Hope and change comes with a price tag- and it’s starting to look like a big lemon if you ask me.

Speaking of which, do we have lemon laws for Presidents?

Failure at leadership leadership example: Breaking promises.

President Obama failed to consult Congress, as promised, before carving out exceptions to the omnibus spending bill he signed into law — breaking his own signing-statement rules two days after issuing them — and raised questions among lawmakers and committees who say the president’s objections are unclear at best and a power grab at worst.

Even his own party cohorts are growing tired of the One’s limited leadership ability.

Barry promised a more transparent government. He touts this to this day. Recently he held a meeting of the minds on health care reform, and he proposed a “down payment” on universal health care.

Senator Kennedy formed a group that has been holding secret meetings for 9 months now, on this topic. He has made this his signature issue, we all know. 9 months worth of meetings and no transparency to date…in fact, Kennedy has made the group swear to keep quiet.

Some details have come out, this article is from February:

Taking part in these meetings, as was reported last week in the New York Times, are a diverse group of stakeholders: AARP, the insurer Aetna, the AFL-CIO, the American Cancer Society, the American Medical Association, America’s Health Insurance Plans, the Business Roundtable, Easter Seals, the National Federation of Independent Business, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

What? No real average people included here?

And now we learn of yet another set of secret meetings, parallel to the above mentioned meetings:

A bipartisan group of nine U.S. senators, after meeting for nine months behind closed doors, is nearing an agreement on the broad strokes of a health care reform bill. The so-called Gang of Nine — though its number expands and contracts depending on the meeting — is hammering out the finer points as they prepare to enter the drafting phase of the negotiations, sources from three Senate offices involved in the talks tell TIME.

Why the secrecy? Why such a hushed tone? Why hasn’t Barry insisted all of this become open and therefore more honest? Do the members of these groups think they know what’s best? Could it be that the committees don’t want the people to know they have discussed rationing care by denying payments for treatments deemed (by some) not to be worthy of their costs?
I bet they do…Didn’t this happen many years ago with Shillary’s Task Forces on health care?

“You don’t need to know what’s going on in the secret meetings to know the two biggest challenges are the individual mandate and costs,” says Senator Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat…

Ahh..here we go. Secrecy because the fear of the masses learning the costs of this.

President Obama, I demand transparency here. The American people have a right to know what their government is up to- especially when it comes to such an important issue as their health care coverage. This isn’t a process unless everyone is included…and we the people most of all need to be included, since WE will be paying for all this.

Funny that this never got mentioned during the campaign last fall, and even now it’s the BBC that’s brought this event to light.

BBC reporter Ian Pannell, discussing the Nosedive in Afghan-US relations, traces the current woes back to a visit last year by Joe Biden to Afghanistan, during which he had a private meeting with Hamid Karzai. Employing the British talent for understatement, Mr. Pannell commented:

A well-placed source describes Mr Biden, exasperated at not getting “straight answers” on drugs and corruption, launching into a verbal tirade and storming out of the meeting.

In a country where honour and decorum are second only to God and country, this was less than tactful.

Curiously, when then Sen. Biden spoke to the Council on Foreign Relations shortly after his return, he somehow neglected to mention this incident.

Had a Bush administration official committed such an offense, the media would have been filled with denunciation of cowboy diplomacy and interviews with academic “experts” decrying the official’s “appalling” ignorance of and disrespect for the cultural mores of Afghan society,

But since the offense came from the other side of the partisan divide, the press of course simply looked away and hurried along to its next criticism of the Bush administration. Instead, all we heard about during the election campaign was how President Obama was going to restore America’s standing around the world. Only a year later are the events of that meeting starting to reach the public – and the source is British, not American media.

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