North Suburban Republican Forum

Archive for the ‘National politics’ Category

“The problems we face today exist because the people who work for a living are out numbered by those who vote for a living.”

In 2004 the GOP establishment backed Arlen Specter, providing the 60th Senate vote for ObamaCare. Why are the bigwigs urging a similar strategy again?

By DICK ARMEY And MATT KIBBE

Republicans seem particularly prone to doing the same thing again and again, expecting a different result. While grass-roots Americans seem more committed than ever to taking their country back from an entrenched political class, particularly those occupying the White House and the U.S. Senate, GOP cognoscenti seem reluctant to offer voters a clear choice in 2012.

President Obama’s re-election campaign is doubling down on the failed economic policies of tax, spend, borrow and print. It’s leaving little doubt in voters’ minds where the aggressively progressive Democratic Party stands.

But what do Republicans believe in? The party’s “experts” are retrenching to the defeatist view that a commitment to economic freedom and constitutionally limited government, particularly among the foot soldiers of the tea party, is a political liability. Indiana’s Sen. Richard Lugar even claims that “Republicans lost the seats [in 2010] in Nevada and New Jersey and Colorado where there were people who were claiming they wanted somebody who was more of their tea party aspect—but they killed off the Republican majority.”

The 36-year incumbent presumably meant to say Delaware, not New Jersey. But what Senate majority was killed off? Read the rest of this entry »

Few legal cases in the modern era are as consequential, or as defining, as the challenges to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that the Supreme Court hears beginning Monday. The powers that the Obama Administration is claiming change the structure of the American government as it has existed for 225 years. Thus has the health-care law provoked an unprecedented and unnecessary constitutional showdown that endangers individual liberty.

It is a remarkable moment. The High Court has scheduled the longest oral arguments in nearly a half-century: five and a half hours, spread over three days. Yet Democrats, the liberal legal establishment and the press corps spent most of 2010 and 2011 deriding the government of limited and enumerated powers of Article I as a quaint artifact of the 18th century. Now even President Obama and his staff seem to grasp their constitutional gamble.

Consider a White House strategy memo that leaked this month, revealing that senior Administration officials are coordinating with liberal advocacy groups to pressure the Court. “Frame the Supreme Court oral arguments in terms of real people and real benefits that would be lost if the law were overturned,” the memo notes, rather than “the individual responsibility piece of the law and the legal precedence [sic].” Those nonpolitical details are merely what “lawyers will be talking about.”

By Charles Krauthammer, Thursday, March 22, 5:50 PM

Filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi, Nancy’s daughter, has unleashed a firestorm of social controversy by interviewing some welfare recipients who told her on camera that they believe they’re entitled to “Obama money.” That is, welfare checks. A number of those that Ms. Pelosi spotlighted are young men who are not even looking for work. They have plenty of excuses for that. But, bottom line, they want money handed to them, and stuff you if you don’t like it. Also, some of these men have multiple children by multiple “baby mamas.” Again, their posture is “blank you” if you don’t approve.

That attitude appalls many hard-working folks, but truthfully, there have always been layabouts and there always will be. But now, in some circles, it’s almost stylish to be a parasite. Recently, Mitt Romney was confronted by a heckler in Illinois who said, “What about pursuit of happiness? You know what would make me happy? Free birth control!”

Whereupon Romney shot back, “If you’re looking for free stuff… vote for the other guy. That’s what he’s about, okay? That’s not what I’m about.”

And therein lies the theme of the 2012 presidential campaign. Read the rest of this entry »

A number of these types of images have been making the rounds lately and this one recently came my way. It seems quite appropriate and an accurate depiction of how others portray conservatives versus what we really are.

http://www.tonysrants.com/national/conservatives-what-we-are-portrayed-as-and-what-we-really-are/

DENVER, CO- A little-known program administered by the Department of Treasury under President Barack Obama’s Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Act steered federal payments to a trendy breakfast haunt in downtown Denver, a Wheat Ridge cycling shop, the Colorado branches of 3 Fortune 500 companies, and a west slope liquor store that now has the curious distinction of being the “largest solar powered liquor store in Colorado,” according to information obtained by The Colorado Observer.

The payments are part of the nearly $1 trillion stimulus package approved in 2009 that the Obama Administration said would keep unemployment nationally below 8 percent.

The Treasury-implemented program, bureaucratically dubbed the 1603 program, has provided renewable energy project developers a lump-sum cash payment in lieu of receiving investment tax credits. Read the rest of this entry »

By DANIEL P. KESSLER

As we approach the second anniversary of ObamaCare, it’s worth re-examining some of the claims its proponents made about the impact of the law on health-care costs. Three of the law’s most-touted cost-control measures have already been shown to be unlikely to succeed.

First, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was supposed to improve efficiency through the creation of Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) and better supply-side incentives through the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP). These would be a “major game-changer,” according to Karen Davis, president of the Commonwealth Fund. The theory is that getting doctors and hospitals to operate under a single umbrella (the Accountable Care Organization) and share in the cost savings they achieve (the Medicare Shared Savings Program) would reduce their incentives to supply treatments that did not give good value.

Neither has worked. In August 2011, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced the results of its Physician Group Practice demonstration project, the model for ACOs and the MSSP. The demo saved Medicare a little more than $100 per beneficiary per year—a bit over 1% of the average cost of an individual’s services, which was described by the demonstration project’s independent evaluator, North Carolina’s Research Triangle Institute, as “small.” Read the rest of this entry »

President Obama says he wants to end subsidies for what he calls “the fuel of the past,” but lucky for him oil and gas will be the fuels of the future too. His budget-deficit blowout would be so much worse without Big Oil, because the truth is that this industry is subsidizing the government.

Much, much worse, actually. The federal Energy Information Administration reports that the industry paid some $35.7 billion in corporate income taxes in 2009, the latest year for which data are available. That alone is about 10% of non-defense discretionary spending—and it would cover a lot of Solyndras. That figure also doesn’t count excise taxes, state taxes and rents, royalties, fees and bonus payments. All told, the government rakes in $86 million from oil and gas every day—far more than from any other business.

Not paying their “fair share”? Here’s a staggering fact: Read the rest of this entry »