Monday, January 31, 2011

Obama - Our Most Contemptible President?

The article below tells us the behavior that may have Obama become the most contemptible, even hated, President. No one can deal with people this way and get away with it. There will be a cost and now it is a matter of seeing how it will be exacted.

This is third-world despot behavior. The Americans I know don’t think in these petty terms. We think in terms of the rule of law applying to all people and when anything gets corrupt, the law is fixed and the corrupt persons thrown out. "How can anyone be so disrespectful of people generally, and of themselves specifically, by destroying the trust that people have in their stewardship of the office for which they were elected?" This is how the Americans I know, think.

Obama has closed the door on any calls he may want to make for the moral high road, a larger purpose, or an inspiring ideal. He won't be able to inspire the people he would need to carry out such a plan. Only fools, in high places and low, will follow him. If doesn't watch it, he's going to find it impossible to get heard.

With this behavior, Obama pisses all over himself – wrecking forever the possibility of his being a great President. Frankly, I don’t think he cares about that. If Radical-in-Chief is true, and given that it is thoroughly researched and logical, I see no reason that it could be anything other than true, his purpose is to destroy America’s system of self-government and replace it with an elitist dictatorship or oligarchy.

Apparently it is a dictatorship. He commented on Mubarak's cutting off the internet as the act of a dictator. Meanwhile, plans are afoot to have Homeland Security be the means for him to do the same thing.

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Tawdry details of Obamacare
White House quietly exempts pampered politicos

By Dr. Milton R. Wolf
The Washington Times

7:21 p.m., Friday, January 28, 2011


If you would like to know what the White House really thinks of Obamacare, there’s an easy way. Look past its press releases. Ignore its promises. Forget its talking points. Instead, simply witness for yourself the outrageous way the White House protects its best friends from Obamacare.

Last year, we learned that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) had granted 111 waivers to protect a lucky few from the onerous regulations of the new national health care overhaul. That number quickly and quietly climbed to 222, and last week we learned that the number of Obamacare privileged escapes has skyrocketed to 733.

Among the fortunate is a who’s who list of unions, businesses and even several cities and four states (Massachusetts, New Jersey, Ohio and Tennessee) but none of the friends of Barack feature as prominently as the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).

How can you get your own free pass from Obamacare? Maybe you can just donate $27 million to President Obama‘s campaign efforts. That’s what Andy Stern did as president of SEIU in 2008. He has been the most frequent guest at Mr. Obama‘s White House.

Backroom deals have become par for the course for proponents of Obamacare. Senators were greased with special favors, like Nebraska Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson and his Cornhusker Kickback and Louisiana Democrat Sen. Mary L. Landrieu and her Louisiana Purchase. Even the American Medical Association was brought in line under threat of losing its exclusive and lucrative medical coding contracts with the government.

Not only are the payoffs an affront to our democracy and an outright assault on our taxpayers, the timing itself of the latest release makes a mockery of this administration’s transparency promises. More than 500 of the 733 waivers, we now know, were granted in December but kept conveniently under wraps until the day after the president’s State of the Union address. HHS is no stranger to covering up bad news; in fact, this is becoming a disturbing pattern. Last year, Secretary Kathleen Sebelius hid from Congress until after the Obamacare vote a damning report from the Medicare and Medicaid Office of the Actuary showing Obamacare would cost $311 billion more than promised and would displace 14 million Americans from their current insurance.

For this administration, transparency promises last only until the teleprompter is unplugged.

Backroom deals and cover-ups may be business as usual for Washington, but understanding why the Obama administration protects its friends from Obamacare offers special insight into what the purveyors of the mandate themselves think about their own law. This is key: The waivers aren’t meant to protect victims from unintended consequences of Obamacare; they are meant to exempt them from the very intentional increased costs of health insurance that the law causes. Under Section 2711 of the Public Health Service Act, Obamacare increases the annual cap of insurance benefits, which sounds great - as does everything else in big government - until the bill comes due, in this case, in the form of higher insurance premiums.

In short, the administration has decided that you will face increased health insurance premiums, but special friends in the unions will not. Look closely, and you’ll see not only the White House‘s duplicity but also what the Obama administration really thinks of its crown jewel, Obamacare. White House words say that the annual insurance benefit cap is a feature of the program, but its actions say that it’s a bug.

The question remains: If Obamacare is such a great law, why does the White House keep protecting its best friends from it?

Our democracy cannot allow a president to exercise the unholy power of picking and choosing winners and losers, of choosing who must follow his flawed laws and who gets a free pass. If any American deserves a waiver from Obamacare, then all Americans do.

It was Mr. Obama himself who infamously said, “We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends.” This president speaks anything but softly, and Obamacare is his big stick.

It’s time to give every American his own waiver: Repeal Obamacare.

Dr. Milton R. Wolf is a board-certified diagnostic radiologist, medical director and cousin of President Obama. He blogs daily at miltonwolf.com.

Sunday, January 23, 2011

Abortion Rights and Why Obama is a Poor Leader

Here’s Obama’s statement on abortion rights.

“Today marks the 38th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that protects women's health and reproductive freedom, and affirms a fundamental principle: that government should not intrude on private family matters.”

Obama does not mention individual rights which is based on property rights which is the fundamental principle governing the right of a woman to her own body and its fetus until it is metaphysically an independent being. (And, the fundamental principle upon which our country is set up.) Rather, he says the fundamental principle is that the government should not “intrude on private family matters.” But if this is a fundamental principle, then one should not intrude on the private family matters of the Muslim honor killers, right? Or one should not intrude into the private family matters of families where a child is locked up in the basement for weeks, right? Or one should not intrude into the private family matters where there a house full of cats, rats or dogs that have become a threat to human life beyond the confines of the person involved, right?

Notice that Obama’s principle is collectivist. The term family refers to a group, not an individual. So, in this seemingly benign statement, he complete overthrows the right of a woman or a man or any individual to his own body – to his life. He overthrows you and me and every person’s right to exist as an individual.

The reason Obama can’t lead is because Obama can’t think in a powerful modern way. His thinking is actually pre-modern. The Enlightenment, the beginning of the modern world, was based on the fact that reason, the method by which a human mind operates, was discovered to be man’s basic means of survival. Out of this came the United States, the only country on the face of the earth set up on the idea that every man has a mind and he should be free to use and depend on it as his basic tool of survival. The reason that Individual Rights is so important is because it frees the human mind. (And because the human mind has generally been free here, the US has prospered and become the richest nation in the world.)

Prior to the Enlightenment – which began in Scotland and then England – man was seen and dealt with as part of a group. Until then the aristocrat and the serf were the two forms human life took and one was in one group or the other. (There were other groups who were outside this axis of power/no power. Traders and Church people being two. But they accounted for a pretty small number of people.) Although trade happened, it wasn’t seen in the way it is now that the individual mind has been set free. Obama, a collectivist and in particular, a socialist - as compared to some earlier forms of group think such as tribes, family clans, etc. – is of a mind that ran the world prior to the Enlightenment. This is why he bows to kings and other leaders and such. It’s his “pre-individual” obeisance to the collectivist, “rulers-of-men” mindset.

The modern view of human being although of European origin is not “white” nor European per se, although I hear black historians portraying it as if the “white man” is its distinguishing characteristic. (When I hear this, I hear a man wanting to return to the pre-modern view of man – a basically ignorant being that can be controlled easily through fear and guilt and be riled up to become dominant over the white man.) The discovery of what is true of man applies to all human beings. What we are faced with with Obama is whether we are going to go back to a pre-reason view of man where he had no choice but to dominate or be dominated by other men, or are we going to deal with each other as individuals who offer us their view of the world and what they see is going on. The success of the US, which O does not like, is apologizing for at every opportunity, and is looting and redistributing its wealth, is a result of the individual being set free and protected in his right to use his own mind. That really is all it is.

So when I hear Obama speak as he does, if I want to be generous I can say that, at best, he is saying something he might say at the beginning of his search for a proper principle. Why this supposedly Constitutional scholar puts this kind of thing into the public discourse doesn’t make sense unless one grasps where Obama is coming from. Neither proper thinking nor the values which honor every individual human being call to him. Neither are his values. As a consequence, he has the whole country in an uproar. He, day in and day out is trying to lay on us that which we are not. He’s trying to force mankind back into a bygone paradigm. By his lack of values which honor the individual and clear principles, he sews the seeds of distrust and argument among the people. How can we trust each other if we, as individuals, have no existence in his mind? Who knows what he will unleash next (and he’s already done lots of damage to us) that will violate our rights?

A good leader could go a long way to quiet things down. However, that leader will not be Obama. I am persuaded he is not capable of such a task given that his orientation is that of a pre-reason collectivist, a community organizer, a troublemaker by another name. He does not care about the plight of any individual person.

Why he would want to make trouble is another topic. Read Radical-in-Chief by Stanley Kurtz and you will understand what has motivated Obama for the whole of his life. Community Organizer has been the means for what he is up to.

Saturday, January 8, 2011

Understanding Derivatives --- A Primer

(I thank a friend, DK, who sent me this. I thought it so well done that it ought to be posted. Every bubble in history has a similar story although the particulars are just enough different to have people think it will be different this time. SCB)
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Heidi is the proprietor of a bar in Detroit.

She realizes that virtually all of her customers are unemployed alcoholics and, as such, can no longer afford to patronize her bar. To solve this problem, she comes up with a new marketing plan that allows her customers to drink now, but pay later. Heidi keeps track of the drinks consumed on a ledger (thereby granting the customers' loans).

Word gets around about Heidi's "drink now, pay later" marketing strategy and, as a result, increasing numbers of customers flood into Heidi's bar. Soon she has the largest sales volume for any bar in Detroit. By providing her customers freedom from immediate payment demands, Heidi gets no resistance when, at regular intervals, she substantially increases her prices for wine and beer, the most consumed beverages. Consequently, Heidi's gross sales volume increases massively.

A young and dynamic vice-president at the local bank recognizes that these customer debts constitute valuable future assets and increases Heidi's borrowing limit. He sees no reason for any undue concern, since he has the debts of the unemployed alcoholics as collateral!!!

At the bank's corporate headquarters, expert traders figure a way to make huge commissions, and transform these customer loans into DRINK BONDS. These "securities" then are bundled and traded on international securities markets. Naive investors don't really understand that the securities being sold to them as "AAA Secured Bonds" really are debts of unemployed alcoholics. Nevertheless, the bond prices continuously climb!!!, and the securities soon become the hottest-selling items for some of the nation's leading brokerage houses.

One day, even though the bond prices still are climbing, a risk manager at the original local bank decides that the time has come to demand payment on the debts incurred by the drinkers at Heidi's bar. He so informs Heidi.

Heidi then demands payment from her alcoholic patrons, but being unemployed alcoholics they cannot pay back their drinking debts.

Since Heidi cannot fulfill her loan obligations she is forced into bankruptcy. The bar closes and Heidi's 11 employees lose their jobs.

Overnight, DRINK BOND prices drop by 90%.

The collapsed bond asset value destroys the bank's liquidity and prevents it from issuing new loans, thus freezing credit and economic activity in the community. The suppliers of Heidi's bar had granted her generous payment extensions and had invested their firms' pension funds in the BOND securities. They find they are now faced with having to write off her bad debt and with losing over 90% of the presumed value of the bonds.

Her wine supplier also claims bankruptcy, closing the doors on a family business that had endured for three generations, her beer supplier is taken over by a competitor, who immediately closes the local plant and lays off 150 workers.

Fortunately though, the bank, the brokerage houses and their respective executives are saved and bailed out by a multibillion dollar no-strings attached cash infusion from the government. The funds required for this bailout are obtained by new taxes levied on employed, middle-class, nondrinkers who have never been in Heidi's bar.

Now does this make sense for you?

(There is a back-story to this tale. What prompted Heidi to came up with the idea of loaning her no-good customers drinks?)

Friday, January 7, 2011

The Con Man Ups the Ante

Obama is a power-lusting con man, a liar. That, more than any other quality describes his character. William Daley, his new Chief of Staff, is his new means of conning the American public so those who do not grasp who Obama is and what requires his conning are fooled into voting for him again. (If you want to understand what requires Obama to be a con man, read Radical-in-Chief by Stanley Kurtz. This well-researched, heavily-documented book makes clear that the con is part and parcel of getting people to believe in socialism.)

Here's another article on the reason FOR selecting Daley. Yes, you guessed it: Reelection in 2012.

The real test of America in 2012 is whether the voters will demand integrity of their leaders or are willing to settle for the superficial b.s. If the latter, we are done - at least until the superficial non-leaders have been proven, to the majority of people, unworthy of the leadership role given them.

(Reality is on our side, because a socialist cannot cause real and positive results to the extent he sticks to socialism. Socialism’s error is that it deals with individuals by the group they are deemed part of and individual needs cannot be glossed over in that way and people thrive. At the level of the individual, socialism separates motive from results. No one can do something with any desire to achieve the result unless he is motivated to do it. Orders from the top down by force destroy that motivation, which explains why socialist societies fail to the extent they are socialist. Since we each deal with each other via the economy – trading what we have for what we need that someone else has, the answer is to get the government SEPARATED from the economy so that these individual transactions have full and free reign, while the government only acts to protect property including the basic property of life and liberty. Then and only then will the government and the economy each be in their proper place.)

This is going to mean a complete revolution in the underlying thought (moral base) which produced America in the first place. Only the sanctity of the individual held as one's highest value (sacrificed for no reason) will reveal the con for what it is and point to the solution for our (and the world's) current problems.