Unemployment at 10% and where is congress? Why spending of course.

From the AP:

The Labor Department said Friday that jobless rate rose to 10.2 percent, the highest since April 1983, from 9.8 percent in September. The economy shed a net total of 190,000 jobs in October, less than the downwardly revised 219,000 lost in September, but more than economists expected.

The jump in the jobless rate reflects a sharp increase in the tally of unemployed Americans, which rose to 15.7 million from 15.1 million. The net loss of jobs occurred across most industries, from manufacturing and construction to retail and financial. That tally is based on a separate survey of businesses.

Economists say the unemployment rate could climb as high as 10.5 percent next year because employers remain reluctant to hire.

And what is the President and Congress doing about it? They are trying to ram down our throats a 1.8 trillion dollar healthcare bill that won't reduce costs, won't improve your care and still won't insure everyone. And it won't get you a job. But one thing it will do...raise your taxes.

And if you want to understand who is driving this bus, all you need to do it look at the White House Visitor's log to see who spends the most time there - Andy Stern of the SIEU(from workerfreedom.org via Americans for Tax Reform).

The White House released an incomplete list of visitors who met with President Obama and top White House officials. Predictably, Andy Stern, President of the Service Employees International Union, stopped by the White House more than any other visitor. The Wall Street Journal Reports:

“Andrew Stern visited the White House 22 times between Inauguration Day and July 31, meeting with President Barack Obama seven times and leading all visitors recorded during that period.”

You don't know who the SIEU is? They are the union that show up in purple shirts (IE the Liberal Astroturf) at every protest to outshout the regular people.

Are you getting it yet?

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Paranormal Activity Courtesy of the Sunlight Foundation

Jake Brewer of the Sunlight Foundation sent this to us today:

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Calling the President a Liar

The Democrat outrage at Joe Wilson correctly (admittedly an inappropriate time and place) identifying President Obama's comments last week as lies has been loud and almost comical. But what about their outrage over these comments from the floor of the House and Senate (from Gateway Pundit):



and this:



or this inappropriate comment by a Speaker of the House:

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Healthcare Bill - Why are people so angry?

Many on the left trully do not understand why people are so angry about the healthcare legislation. And because they do not understand, they assume that the protestors are ginned up by insurance company and lobbyists. The sad thing is that their lack of understanding contributes to their ignorance and in a spiral to anger generated by their comments.

Reason 1. The holier than thou claim that they are the only ones who want to fix healthcare.

Perhaps the problem with this reasoning is that not everyone is trying to fix the same thing. Most people are happy with the current healthcare ranging from 54-80 percent agreeing depennding on the poll. The rub for many is the rising cost as a percentage of personal expenses that health insurance consumes (even if your company pays for most of it). To fix this problem you need to have a serious discussion of the subsidization of government Medicare and Medicaide patients by private health insurance patients. You also need to discuss torts and their impact on Doctor behavior, insurance company allocation and Pharmaceutical firm pricing policies. You also should add to the mix the growing number of illegals being treated for free at emergency rooms around the country.

But very little of the items above have been discussed. In addition, Barack Obama wants to fix the "50 million uninsured". We will discuss that below. Nancy Pelosi wants to penalize health insurance companies. If you cannot agree on the nature of the problem, you cannot take corrective action.

Reason 2. No one believes the 50 Million Uninsured number.

And the President keeps repeating it as fact. Lets take some facts from the Business Media Institute study on this number:

Myth: There are between 40 million and 50 million uninsured Americans. President Obama referred to “46 million uninsured Americans” in May 2009.

Fact: Anyone who reports that there are more than 46 million uninsured is exaggerating since the Census Bureau puts the number of uninsured at 45,657,000 people.

Fact: Nearly 10 million (9.7) of the 45.7 million uninsured are “not a citizen.” That makes every media claim of uninsured Americans higher than 35.9 million is wrong.

Myth: The 40 million to 50 million uninsured cannot afford health insurance.

Fact: More than 17 million of the uninsured make at least $50,000 per year (the median household income of $50,233) – 8.4 million make $50,000 to $74,999 per year and 9.1 million make $75,000 or higher. Two economists working at the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded that 25 to 75 percent of those who do not purchase health insurance coverage “could afford to do so.”

Myth: The 40 million to 50 million uninsured do not get health care.

Fact: The National Center for Policy Analysis estimates that uninsured people get about $1,500 of free health care per year, or $6,000 per family of four.

Fact: An Urban Institute study found that 25 percent of the uninsured already qualify for government health insurance programs.

Myth: People will remain uninsured without government assistance.

Fact: The Congressional Budget Office says that 45 percent of the uninsured will be insured within four months. CBO Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin also said that the frequent claim of 40+ million Americans lacking insurance is an “incomplete and potentially misleading picture of the uninsured population.”

Fact: Liberal non-profit Kaiser Family Foundation put the number of uninsured Americans who do not qualify for government programs and make less than $50,000 a year between 8.2 million and 13.9 million. (The 8.2 million figure includes only those uninsured for two years or more.)

Fact: CBO analysis found that 36 million people would remain uninsured even if the Senate’s $1.6 trillion health care plan is passed.

Reason 3. Democrats desire to ram the legislation through congress.

We have commented here many times on the "rush to bad legislation" technique perfected by this congress. Haste makes waste and this Congress and President are experts at waste. And the citizens have caught on. The know their legislators are not reading the legislation and are wondering why. They are also wondering who is really writing the legislation and suspect that there is far more influence coming from lobbyists than from many representatives. They KNOW that they do not have a seat at the negotiating table yet George Soros does and they don't like it.

Reason 4. You reap what you sow.

Democrats have long espoused that dissent is important to the democracy and they are correct. But once normal people start dissenting, all of a sudden they don't like it. For years they have dispatched unions, Code Pink, Al Sharpton, Jessie "extortion" Jackson and a variety of other organnized protestors to events to put pressure on various entuities and lawmakers. Regular people have woken up and after 7 years of watching these organnized groups protest George Bush, they have decided not to stand up for themselves.

Reason 5. Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have disdain for the citizens of this country.

We all know when we are being talked down to and mocked. Barack Obama tries to demonized those who do not agree lockstep with everything he espouses. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid declared in the USA Today that the protestors are fake and un-American. Here is a statistic for you. Since I work in New York City, I know a lot of people who are very left of center. I also have numerous conservative friends. I do not know one single person who has attended a peace demonstration during the Bush years. And I know at least 10 who have attended tea parties or town halls on healthcare. And they didn't get bussed in-the drove their SUV's.

Astroturf. I don't think so. All of this is pissing people off. Assuming the Democrats continue on their current course, it will get worse long before it gets better.

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Real protests vs Astroturf

I have always wondered how party leaders like Reid and Pelosi can criticize normal citizens who attend tea parties and now town hall meetings. When I normally see the photos, I see homemade signs by the tea party people yet the standard Democrat party protestor has printed signs. And the normal people are the fakes?

This post at Lookingattheleft.com explains it all and is a MUST see.

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Christie. Corzine and Democrat Corruption

Reviewing the new Corzine add that shows Chris Christie leaving a congressional committee convened to attack him for alleged no bid contracts. The humorus past of this add is that it almost seems to have been prepared and filmed BEFORE Christie was "invited" to the House committee hearings. Does it not bother anyone that this heharing was convened to assist Corzine in attacking Christie.

Let's review:

1. The House has no interest in investigating Charlie Rangel accused of several tax violations and abusing housing rules intended for poor families.
2. The House has no interest in investigatiing Jack Murtha's bribe steering to his son, trashing and pre-judging our troops in Iraq and continual person of interest in a major corruption scandal.
3. The House has no interest in investigating Nancy Pelosi's accusation that the CIA lied to congress desppite evidence that it is Pelosi who lied.

But they do have time to bring in a New Jersey Federal Prosecutor who is running for Governor and also put away 128 of their friends. Curious.

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WSJ: Obama and the Economy

The Wall Street Journal had an excellent opinion piece in regard to the President and his advisors and their economic policies. One of the most telling items was in the subtitle:

As the Dow keeps dropping, the President is running out of people to blame.

This was no partisan screed. It was documentation of the impact that Obama's policies are rapidly having on the only economic indicator that can react to events close to when they occur.

As 2009 opened, three weeks before Barack Obama took office, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 9034 on January 2, its highest level since the autumn panic. Yesterday the Dow fell another 4.24% to 6763, for an overall decline of 25% in two months and to its lowest level since 1997. The dismaying message here is that President Obama's policies have become part of the economy's problem.

While it is clear that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid along with the Obama Administration have incited absolute class warfare. The problem is that they are doing it by scaring away the people they will need to fuel the programs they insist are so important. And what's worse is that they are hiding behind the economic situation to push their agenda through hoping that no one is noticing. But the market is clearly paying attention.

So what has happened in the last two months? The economy has received no great new outside shock. Exchange rates and other prices have been stable, and there are no security crises of note. The reality of a sharp recession has been known and built into stock prices since last year's fourth quarter.

What is new is the unveiling of Mr. Obama's agenda and his approach to governance. Every new President has a finite stock of capital -- financial and political -- to deploy, and amid recession Mr. Obama has more than most. But one negative revelation has been the way he has chosen to spend his scarce resources on income transfers rather than growth promotion. Most of his "stimulus" spending was devoted to social programs, rather than public works, and nearly all of the tax cuts were devoted to income maintenance rather than to improving incentives to work or invest.

His Treasury has been making a similar mistake with its financial bailout plans. The banking system needs to work through its losses, and one necessary use of public capital is to assist in burning down those bad assets as fast as possible. Yet most of Team Obama's ministrations so far have gone toward triage and life support, rather than repair and recovery.

Read the entire article here.

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Earmarks vs Porkulus

Barack Obama and congressional Democrats keep touting a canard that this wonderful stimulus bill they are ramming through is "completely free of earmarks". Let's examine that statement. The definition of an Earmark is as follows (from Wikipedia):

In US politics an earmark is a congressional provision that directs approved funds to be spent on specific projects or that directs specific exemptions from taxes or mandated fees.

Earmarks can be found both in legislation (also called "Hard earmarks" or "Hardmarks") and in the text of Congressional committee reports (also called "Soft earmarks" or "Softmarks"). Hard earmarks are binding and have the effect of law, while soft earmarks do not have the effect of law but by custom are acted on as if they were binding.[1] Typically, a legislator seeks to insert earmarks that direct a specified amount of money to a particular organization or project in his/her home state or district.

So if we parse the words, to be an earmark it should:

a. the direction of funds in a bill
b. be inserted by a senator or member of congress
c. to benefit their states or districts financially

I have reviewed the drafts of pieces of this legislation and the summaries. I would estimate that more than half of this entire bill is an earmark. Just because the spending size is so large that multiple senators and members of congress are taking home the loot, doesn't negate it fact that it is for an earmark.

Some favorites rumored to be in the final legislation:

- LA to Vegas train (Reid)
- $30 million dollars in wetlands preservation for San Fran (Pelosi)
- $200 million dollar power plan in IL (Obama)
- Major funds for building govt building projects in Maryland, Virginia and Georgia
- 80 billion for outright payments for state who have through their out of control spending are in financial trouble (see California, New York, Michigan and New Jersey)
- 6.5 billion for National Institute of Health as a buyout for Republic Arlen Specter


If it looks like an earmark, costs like an earmark, is hidden into legislation like and earmark with no attribution....it's an earmark.

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Voters do what Pelosi wouldn't. Fire Jefferson.

Anh "Joseph" Chao beat Louisiana's William Jefferson yesterday to finally remove this corrupt Democrat from office(from the Times Picayune):

Indicted U.S. Rep. William Jefferson suffered what may be the final blow of his storied political career in the most improbable way Saturday, when an untested Republican opponent took advantage of Louisiana's new federal voting rules -- and an election delay caused by Hurricane Gustav -- to unseat the nine-term Democrat.

Jefferson was caught with bundles of cash in his freezer. He was known to be corrupt and has been under investigation for some time. He has also been under indictment for some time as well. And Nancy Pelosi, who claimed that she was going to run the most ethical congress in history, looked the other way. Just like she is looking the other way on Charlie Rangel's tax evasion.

Leadership according to the Democratic party is that anything goes as long as it keeps Pelosi in power. At least this time, the voters had a different opinion.

Read the entire article here.

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Charlie Rangel has done it again. Taxes for you but not for him!

The New York Post has once again caught Charlie Rangel playing tax games on residences. You may recall the scandal before the election about Rangel's vacation residence in the Dominican Republic that he didn't bother to declared on his tax return. Or his use of two rent stabilized apartments for himself and his campaign offices. And now this:

Harlem Rep. Charles Rangel took a "homestead" tax break on a Washington, DC, house for years while simultaneously occupying multiple rent-stabilized apartments in New York City, possibly violating laws and regulations in both cases.

You may ask, what is wrong with that?

The situation raises a number of potential problems for the congressman, including:

* New York City law requires that tenants use rent-stabilized apartments as their primary residence.

* DC's real Property Homestead Deduction Act also requires that a property receiving the benefit be a primary residence.

* Tax lawyers told The Post that a property owner cannot have two primary residences - or take advantages provided to primary residences at two different addresses simultaneously.

* DC's law also requires that the owner of a property benefiting from the tax break be a personal-income taxpayer in DC. District law exempts members of Congress from paying personal DC income tax, but they must pay property tax.

The real issue is so much deeper than this newly reported story. This mean is Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. This committee is responsible for setting tax policy. And this is the third time in three months that Charlie Rangel has had serious allegations brought up accusing him of at least an ethical violation and at worst a crime. If it were you or I, we would be in handcuffs.

And worse than this, Nancy Pelosi has not seen fit to even reprimand Rangel. It is frankly the kind of corruption the Democrats have perpetuated for some time with a public too dense to hold them to account. Rangel has crossed the line and is actively subverting exactly the tax policy he wants applied to you. He is a criminal.

Read the entire Post story here.

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Pelosi's Follies

Let's be clear to all reading this on where you should concentrate your own research efforts in regard to the bailout bill. Both parties came together to craft a (frankly poor - my opinion) bill that raids taxpayers pockets. But many were ready to hold their nose and vote to help the markets.

Several things then happened to change the game.

1. Pelosi majority whip didn't whip (major warning sign to Republicans)
2. Pelosi then took the House floor and fixed blame on the Republicans. We have discussed this topic on NJ Tax Revolution and it is clear that at the least this problem was caused by both parties. At worst it should tilt in the Democrats favor.
3. Republicans can count votes. Pelosi gave permission to her caucus to vote their conscience while expecting Republicans to bail her caucus out.
4. Republicans caught wind and voted their conscience too.
5. The measure was defeated.

That's what happened. No more. No less.

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Pelosi Orders Wall Street Probe - here is my list of witnesses.

From Politico:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has ordered a broad, swift investigation of Wall Street and will demand testimony from Bush administration officials and captains of finance, congressional officials said

Let's help out with the witness list:

1. Franklin Raines
2. Jamie Gorelick
3. Chris Dodd
4. Barack Obama
5. Joe Biden
6. Andrew Coumo
7. William Jefferson Clinton
8. Hillary Clinton
9. John Kerry
10. Jim Johnson

And here is what you should ask. For all the former Democrat appointees from the Clinton administration, ask them why they lined their pockets while creating an environment that destroyed the mortgage industry in the United States by purposely breaking down the controls for mortgage lending to non-qualified buyers. And ask the politicians on this list what thhey received for the tens of thousands of donations they received from their corrupt friends.

After you are done with that, sure, go to Wall Street. But I suspect you won't have to or want to.

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Pelosi as usual takes no responsibility!

Despite mounds of evidence that the Democrats created the environment that created the mortgage crisis, actively fed and watered it with their corrupt friends and then personally benefitted from their lack of oversight a wink and a nod and some campaign contributions, their leaders refuse to take any responsibility.

From TheHIll:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, when asked Tuesday whether Democrats bear some of the responsibility regarding the current crisis on Wall Street, had a one-word answer: “No.”

Pelosi (D-Calif.) ripped President Bush’s “mismanagement” of the economy and a lack of regulation that led to the current situation.

“I think the American people have had it with this situation where the middle-income people in our country are not protected from the ramifications of the risk-taking and the greed of these financial institutions,” Pelosi told MSNBC.

You are right Nancy. We are tired of your blaming the mortgage companies alone for a situation that you bought and paid for. You know the greed I recognized from this situation? Franklin Raines (Clinton White House Budget director and Obama consultant) received 100 million dollars in greed money before he got caught. How about Democratic operative Jamie Gorelick who received 25 million FOR HER LACK OF OVERSIGHT!

Nancy Pelosi is a partisan hack who is in way over her head. She has presided over the most unpopular congress in the history of the United States. She has accomplished nothing and blames everyone else for her failures. She is nothing more or less than an empty suit and our country is worse for it.

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