As they sit in the warm sun and listen to the celebrity speakers tell them about their bright future a grim reality will set in once the graduation cakes are cut and consumed.

The reality is that, particularly on Long Island, the job outlook is bleak, affordable housing is out of reach, our elected leaders are clueless and whatever opportunity can be found will be found in other parts of the country.

While some of us fight to cut the government leviathan down to size so that is doesn’t suck up the resources that productive people are better suited to employ, those in office are fighting for their own survival and will stop at nothing to hold onto office.

College Loans

As someone paying for their children’s college education, I don’t like paying any more than I have to, but the focus on holding interest rates constant is misguided. College graduates need jobs, not more debt. President Obama and local representatives like Tim Bishop already have piled up enormous debt that our children and grandchildren will have to pay back. Making it more affordable to take on more debt is not a winning strategy. Congressman Bishop used to run a local college, Southampton, that had to be bailed out via a purchase by Stony Brook University. As Einstein said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

Bishop Touts Highway Bill

On his website Tim Bishop boasts about his support for the two-year transportation bill. While keeping our roads in good repair is important, a closer reading of what Mr. Bishop says is revealing. The highway bill, “would create or sustain 113,300 construction jobs in New York alone: 61,100 in highway construction and 52,200 in mass transit construction, according to the US Department of Transportation.” There it is: “create or sustain.” Well, Congressman, which one is it? How many jobs will be created and how many will be sustained? Any economist, and almost anyone else for that matter, can count a new job. After all, there is a bit of paperwork associated with filling a new job, W-4 forms, I-9 forms, etc. But there isn’t a soul who can count a job sustained.

Created vs. Sustained

Why is that important that we know the difference? Because if you recall with the great stimulus bill, in Tim Bishop’s district, $105 million dollars was spent on school districts to create seven new jobs. In that case the teacher’s union, a big Bishop supporter, got a lot of money and our children and grandchildren got the bill. So how many new jobs will the transportation bill create? We also know that those highway jobs are heavily unionized and the unions back Bishop. Coincidence?

Perhaps another reason Bishop doesn’t want to say how many jobs will be created  is that he could be held accountable. Remember how that pesky promise to keep unemployment below 8% if we gave Obama nearly a trillion dollars blew up in his face?

A Coherent Policy?

On the one hand Bishop is pushing to drive more people into going to college whether they can afford it or not or whether they belong there or not. On the other hand he is pushing spending on construction jobs. How many of our college graduates are going to take those construction jobs? It’s more government spending coming and going. No spending cuts, just more spending, more debt, kick the can down the road.

What we need is less government and more entrepreneurs; less taxes sucking resources out of the economy and more investors putting money where it will generate the most returns; the realization that college isn’t for everyone and we need skilled blue-collar workers who can operate computerized machines in our factories; lower energy costs so that we can afford to actually run factories. We need to unleash the imagination and brainpower of hundreds of millions of Americans in the private sector and not count on bureaucrats picking and choosing winners and losers based on their left-wing ideology.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

President Obama has been on the stump trying to cobble together a coalition that will help keep him in the White House. It matters little what damage his actions might do to America, he has bigger plans and needs more “flexibility” to get them done.

On college campuses he is trying to gin up support by making the interest rate on college loans a campaign issue. The issue is government subsidized Stafford loans. He wants to freeze the current interest rates at 3.4% and he wants the Republicans to fight him on this so that he can create another class warfare wedge issue.

Where have we seen something like this before? Wasn’t the government’s heavy involvement in housing, pushing for everyone to be a homeowner that led to the housing bubble? When that bubble burst, all hell broke loose with it and Obama was able to ride the gush of air into the White House.

Think about the growing debt being accumulated by college students and think about their job prospects in the Obama economy. It is not a pretty picture. What happens if those students upon graduating say, “I can’t find a decent job. I have been duped. I’m not paying back my student loans.” What do you do? Jail them?

Now if interest rates climb, the economic effect will be to curtail borrowing, that is, the old price, supply and demand thing. But if interest rates are kept low, then the demand for more debt will not be curtailed. If the demand for more debt is not curtailed the bubble grows. Four more years of Obama managing the economy will not be a boon to jobs. If we haven’t figured that out yet, we better start studying quickly. There’s a big test coming in November.

I fully appreciate the college financing issue. But the education model is broken. Colleges seem to raise tuition in lock step with increases in government aid, so no progress is made. Colleges also seem to be afraid of not attracting enough students so they fill their course catalogs with nonsense courses that will interest no employer. The amount of debt piling up is frightening, but hey, we have a president to reelect. We’ll fix that later; just like Social Security, Medicare, budget deficits…

The Republicans are right to at least demand cuts in spending elsewhere to pay for this. They know the problem won’t get fixed or even addressed with Obama at the helm. We have to hang on for another six or seven months to cancel Obama’s contract and then prepare to roll up our sleeves and undo the damage he has done.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

A funny thing happened as Congressman Tim Bishop tries to manufacture a campaign issue. The very thing he is fighting about, we learn that the government has been underwriting with taxpayer dollars.

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) had a program to train people in Sri Lanka high-tech IT skills so that they could better compete in the world economy. Needless to say, such competition would come at the expense of American workers. As a free marketer, I don’t have a problem with private enterprises investing their own money any where they want to. I have a big problem with using taxpayer dollars to train foreigners to take away American jobs.

My first problem is with the morality of taking taxpayer dollars to help take away taxpayer jobs. My second problem is that I don’t find a right to do that anywhere in the Constitution. To his credit Tim Bishop in 2010 fought to stop the program.

In 2010, Bishop compelled USAID to abandon a high-tech training program for outsourcing industry workers in Sri Lanka, with the agency committing to “conduct a review to ensure the project will not take any jobs away from Americans.”

Note the year. Tim Bishop has been in Congress since 2002. This program came to light as a result of investigative reporting by Information Week magazine, in August of 2010. What else was happening in the fall of 2010? Tim Bishop was running for reelection against Randy Altschuler who started a business and later sold it that provided business services to companies with employees in the US and overseas. Bishop won by a whisker, but the outsourcing angle is his last, best hope for his rematch with Altschuler.

The problem is that Congress holds the purse strings and this program could not have been funded without Congress’ approval. What did Tim Bishop know and when did he know it? If he argues he was unaware of the program the question becomes, is the federal government that Tim Bishop loathes shrinking, too big for Congress to properly oversee? If Tim Bishop did know about it, why didn’t he stop it earlier or prevent it from being funded in the first place?

I am reminded of that famous scene in the movie Casablanca, where Claude Rains professes to be “shocked, SHOCKED,” that gambling is going on in the back room as member of the club’s staff comes out to hand him his gambling winnings.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM_A4Skusro

Now it turns out a new program has been launched by the Obama administration (again USAID) to train people in the Philippines to speak better English to prepare them for better jobs, such as in outsourced call centers. This is what President Obama said at an insourcing summit:

 ”My message to business leaders today is simple. Ask yourself what you can do to bring jobs back to the country that made our success possible. And I’m going to do everything in my power to help you do it.”

Really? But is anyone surprised that this president says one thing while doing the exact opposite? President Obama and Tim Bishop bailed out GM, which then immediately turned around and increased offshore production.

Instead of funding the training of people in other countries to compete for American jobs, perhaps the focus should be on revising our tax code so that the US doesn’t have the highest corporate tax rate in the world, which makes it attractive to locate operations overseas in the first place. The tax code also traps profits from those operations overseas so that it makes sense for businesses to expand those operations overseas rather than bring the money back to the US (where it will get taxed more as soon as it arrives) to expand here.

Just more hypocrisy from the big government crowd. They don’t fix problems. They screw the American people coming and going. It’s time for a change.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

It the last few days we have heard President Obama ranting about the Supreme Court. This is not anything new. You may also recall his unprecedented calling out of the Supreme Court as the justices sat in front of him during his State of the Union speech attacking them over the Citizens United v FEC case.

The Great Reconciler has also done this in other venues. After Paul Ryan released his budget last year, President Obama invited him to a speech on the budget and with Ryan sitting there devoted his speech attacking the Ryan plan. Very classy. Is this what we hoped and changed for?

Obama and the Constitution

What is most disturbing to me is what Obama is saying about the Supreme Court’s role with regard to the Constitution. What he is saying is approaching downright ignorance and yet he taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. What did he teach his students? Where are these students today? Are they some sort of Manchurian Candidates to be unleashed with their own new-found ignorance upon us as lawyers and judges? Are we watching a bad science fiction movie?

‘I am confident,” announced the president of the United States, “that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.” – President Barack Obama, earlier this week.

Unprecedented? What exactly is unprecedented? What is extraordinary? Striking down a law? That capability of the Supreme Court was established by the Marbury v Madison  case in 1803. One hundred fifty-eight acts of Congress have been overturned by the Supreme Court since Marbury. Sounds like a lot of precedent to me.

A strong majority? ObamaCare was passed by a margin of 219 to 212. What would a weak majority be? Actually, since we often hear our liberal friends cry out for bipartisanship, let me point out that there was bipartisan opposition to ObamaCare. Every Republican and thirty-four Democrats voted against it. Only Democrats voted for it.

Passed by a democratically elected Congress? Is there another kind of Congress than a democratically elected one? Also, in order for a review by the Supreme Court, a law by definition has to be passed by Congress. Otherwise it is just a bill and has no effect on anyone. Doesn’t constitutional law professor Barack Obama know any of this? Isn’t he embarrassed to be saying such things? It is clear that most American citizens, sixty-seven percent by some polls, think the individual mandate is unconstitutional. Do they understand the Constitution better than a man who took an oath to preserve, protect and defend it?

I think an effort should be made to find every student who sat in one of Barack Obama’s constitutional law classes. Give them a test on their comprehension of the Constitution. If they fail, force the University of Chicago to refund their tuition for that course and send them to take Hillsdale College’s Constitution 101. It’s a free ten week course and perhaps the students can help out by donating their refunded tuition money to Hillsdale.

We should all be very concerned that this kind of thinking is being taught in our law schools and will one day come back to destroy the Constitution. Some on the left are trying to call any invalidating of ObamaCare as judicial activism on the right. Adhering to the founding principles and the original intent behind the Constitution is not activism, it is the sworn duty of the justices. If you want to know what activism sounds like, go no further than the words of Associate Justice and former chief counsel of the ACLU Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the court should do a “salvage job,” not undertake a “wrecking operation.”

It is judicial activism for the court to try to salvage Congress’ work. It violates the separation of powers. It is the job of the judiciary to interpret the law not make the law. If they interpret the law to be unconstitutional it is not their job to fix it. That’s Congress’ responsibility, but Ginsburg knows full well that the Congress that passed this monstrosity isn’t there any more and will not be there again any time soon. There is a new Congress that was swept in, to a large extent based on the outrage over ObamaCare. Ginsburg is afraid that if the Supreme Court doesn’t salvage it, sending it back to Congress would put the final nail in the coffin. RIP.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

When you try to manufacture a campaign issue it requires some deception and in the more extreme cases outright lies. This is because the truth doesn’t have to be manufactured. It stands tall on its own.

As Mark Twain said, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” That’s what the left is banking on. So let’s dig a little deeper into the hearings at the center of the controversy.

House Oversight Committee Hearing

Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform, Darrell Issa, scheduled a hearing on religious liberty in the face of the ObamaCare mandate requiring the purchase of contraceptives by all employers regardless of their own religious beliefs. It is customary for the minority party (Democrats at this time) to choose one witness. The Democrats chose Barry Lynn and Sandra Fluke. Byron York of the Examiner provides some detail.

“The Democrats played games with us the day before [the hearing],” says a Republican committee source.  “After days of asking for a witness, they waited until the last-minute, the afternoon before the hearing.  They asked us to invite Rev. Barry Lynn [head of Americans United for Separation of Church and State] and Ms. Fluke.  We said we’ll invite one, per standard procedure.  We formally invited Rev. Lynn, and the Democrats, at 4:30 pm, changed their mind and said they wanted Fluke.  We said too late.  They told Rev. Lynn not to show up the next day.”

Issa explained that Democrats had requested Barry Lynn, that Lynn was invited, and that Democrats then retracted the Lynn request.  As for Fluke, Issa said Republicans had never heard of the Democrats’ last-minute choice.  “I asked our staff what is her background, what has she done,” Issa said at the hearing.  “They did the usual that we do when we’re not provided the three days and the forms to go with it. They did a Google search. They looked and found that she was, in fact, and is a college student who appears to have become energized over this issue and participated in approximately a 45-minute press conference…I cannot and will not arbitrarily take a majority or minority witness if they do not have the appropriate credentials, both for a hearing at the full committee of the U.S. House of Representatives and if we cannot vet them in a timely fashion.”

Barry Lynn is both a lawyer and holds a degree in theology. He is an author, radio host, frequent television commentator, and he has held senior positions at the national level for the United Church and the ACLU. I would probably agree little with Rev. Lynn, but you can’t argue he has credentials. Who is Sandra Fluke? She is a law student, not a lawyer; she was president of a college club that advocated “reproductive justice.” How does that fit in with a hearing on religious liberty. It doesn’t and the Democrats don’t care.

When the hearing began, the Democrats attacked the Republicans. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) asked, “Where are the women?” There were two panels that day, which according to my sources is typical when more than four people testifying. The second panel had two women on it. My source also tells me that the witness list was released a week before the hearing so either Rep. Maloney was deceitful or she doesn’t know what is going on in the committee she is a member of.  I am sure if pressed, Rep. Maloney would say, there were no women on the panel in front of me. But it is all part of the big lie, it was done for the cameras and the sound bite.

Since their plan to put on Sandra Fluke failed, they staged their own show.

Steering and Policy Committee

The Steering and Policy Committee is the committee that actually had Sandra Fluke address them on February 23. The purpose of the Steering and Policy Committee is to assign fellow party members to other House committees, and it also advises party leaders on policy. It is chaired by Nancy Pelosi. What does anything that Sandra Fluke has to say have to do with assigning party members to other committees or advising party leaders on policy. Nancy Pelosi policy on ObamaCare was clear, “we have to pass the bill to find out what’s in the bill.” She didn’t do any fact-finding then, and she isn’t interested in facts now. It was all a show, and it was all for what is popularly called the “optics”.

Who Is Sandra Fluke?

Sandra Fluke is an attractive, clean-cut, woman who is poised in this setting. She is thirty years old, and she has been a left-wing advocate, so she provides the right look for the ensuing sound bites. She provides the right optics.

Before going to Georgetown Ms. Fluke researched the University’s health care policies and learned that they did not provide contraceptive coverage. She enrolled anyway and started working to overturn that policy. In her opening remarks she confidently states that President Obama’s policy “adjustment” of paying out of the left pocket instead of the right “addresses any potential conflict.” That’s another lie. It does not address large institutions that are also self insured, but that doesn’t matter, the narrative must go on; the campaign issue must be built. Just steamroll any real concerns of the other side.

While trying to defend ObamaCare her opening exposes the major problem with it when she says contraception can cost $3,000 during law school. President Obama and the woman sitting in front of Ms. Fluke, Nancy Pelosi, told us how ObamaCare was going to control costs. A quick check on the internet reveals that contraception can be purchased for about half of what Fluke says, but if someone else is paying for it, why would you bother to check? It was probably unintentional but she blew a hole in the theory that ObamaCare will save money. It won’t.

She scrupulously avoids talking about her personal behavior but talks about other women and friends. That is the trap Rush Limbaugh fell into by characterizing a behavior to her that she didn’t discuss. It was out-of-bounds for him to do so, and the Democrats, ever anxious to keep the discussion away from the real issues have made this a major focus.

Why didn’t she talk about herself? I don’t care about her activities, but everything she said was hearsay. Who were these other women? She didn’t give their names. How can we verify their stories? Do they really exist? Why didn’t they come and testify themselves? Wouldn’t it be more compelling to have a first hand account. Yes, but consider the optics. What if they were not as polished? What if they felt foolish trying to go in front of Congress to discuss a $10 item?

She talked about the financial burden of buying contraceptives, but said nothing about the financial burden of college tuition which is thirty times more. What do you think is causing these students a financial strain, tuition or contraception?

She talked about clinics being unable to meet the “crushing demand” for contraceptives. Why not set up a charity that progressives can contribute to that would provide more funds? If given a choice if they would underwrite what Ms. Fluke is advocating, would they? Nancy Pelosi is a multi-millionaire. Wouldn’t it help her cause if she wrote a big six figure check to kick it off?

She then brought out the campaign theme that any restrictions on what is decided between a woman and her doctor is “policing her body.” She said that 65% of students were “interrogated” about the need for contraceptives for non-birth control purposes. Maybe it’s time for a brief recap. We are talking about a $10-$15 item. One story she relates is about a woman who finds out at the pharmacy counter that her health plan doesn’t cover her contraceptives and has to turn away. Really? How about not having two cups of Starbucks this week so you have contraceptives for a month? For a $10 item you are going to sit through an interrogation? How about giving up your iPhone for a cheaper model? These are law students she is talking about at a prestigious university and they can’t figure out how to come up with $10? How about asking your boyfriend to help? Why not ask mom and dad? Why raise taxes on some poor guy who is not going to Georgetown law to pay for your $10 contraceptive while he is trying to live from paycheck to paycheck and take care of his own family?

There is no free lunch, Sandra. If you don’t pay someone else has to. You can say Georgetown can afford it! Maybe so, but they have to find a way. What do you suggest? Raise tuition? Lay off a maintenance worker or a receptionist? Cut back on scholarships, so that you don’t have to come up with $10 on your climb to the 1% club once you get out of Georgetown.

Fair and Balanced?

Where are the other women, Leader Pelosi, who don’t agree with Sandra Fluke. Why didn’t you ask fellow Georgetown student Angela Morabito testify? Because lies don’t like sunshine and fresh air.

The lie has been crafted. It’s about policing a woman’s body. It is being packaged. It is being taken on the road at The View, she has been on NBC news three times, and she received a phone call from President Obama. Are you going to be taken by the lie?

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

As a member of the European parliament, Daniel Hannan represents the United Kingdom to that body. Should America be heeding any warnings from the European Union?

Daniel Hannan is an anomaly. He is a true conservative and he speaks plainly. He is a great admirer of our Constitution and to hear him speak, as I did at CPAC in Washington, makes an American feel pride in our great history. This is worth a listen for all Americans. It is not a short speech, running around twenty-seven minutes. So relax, settle into a comfortable chair, prepare an adult beverage or a cup of tea and enjoy. But when the speech is over, don’t forget the warning that he has for us. In November 2012, we will make a decision that could save us or condemn us. He is introduced by Al Cardenas, Chairman of the American Conservative Union.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2OOtQs0A8k

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

We know that Tim Bishop hates outsourcing. He has gone so far as to introduce new legislation to prevent outsourcing of call center jobs. Tim Bishop may be a very big oursourcer himself.

Tim Bishop supported the auto bailout of GM and Chrysler with tax dollars. Chrysler is now owned by Fiat, an Italian automaker. That means that all Chrysler employees who are not employed in Italy, are by Tim Bishop’s definition, outsourced. If he is consistent with his beliefs he should demand that all Chrysler jobs be relocated to Italy, so that this invidious outsourcing is stopped.

GM, the other half of the auto bailout Bishop voted for, although still an American company took taxpayer dollars and then increased the amount of automobile production overseas by 35%. More outsourcing.

So, Tim Bishop is outraged by the amount of outsourcing going on by private companies, but he doesn’t seem to have a problem taking your money through taxes and outsourcing jobs as long as a big union, such as the United Auto Workers, is in favor of it. If a union like the Communications Workers of America complains about call center jobs being outsourced it’s an outrage, and Tim Bishop takes umbrage with that and introduces legislation to stop it. If another union, the United Auto Workers, begs the Obama administration to bail them out even if it means outsourcing more jobs, Tim Bishop blithely goes along.

So, which is it Tim? Is outsourcing good or is outsourcing bad? Or do you just not have a clue? Don’t answer that until you hear from Nancy Pelosi, President Obama, the CWA, the UAW, United Federation of Teachers or whomever else does your economic thinking for you.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

As the Democrats bid a tearful farewell to using abortion as a winning campaign issue, they need to manufacture a replacement. So they have come up with contraceptives and how those mean Republicans want to restrict a women’s access to them. It’s a lie and they know it, but hey, elections are at stake.

Some say it began with George Stephanopoulos’ bizarre questioning of Mitt Romney on a state’s right to ban contraceptives during one of the presidential debates. Some say it goes back further to a Virginia Senate race between Tim Kaine and George Allen. The problem for Democrats is that they used to run on an abortion platform and public opinion gave them a ten point edge on that subject. The polls have shifted and now it is a ten point loser. So what’s a liberal to do? Well, people still favor birth control, so let’s make it look like Republicans are against that! Brilliant!

The trick is how to do it. How about putting a Trojan Horse in the middle of ObamaCare? Have ObamaCare require contraceptives even by the Catholic Church. Conservatives and Republicans will object and voila, we have a campaign issue. But what are we really talking about?

Access to Contraceptives or Free Recreational Sex?

The First Amendment to the Constitution states:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;…

If it is the Catholic Church’s fundamental teaching that artificial birth control is immoral, Congress is forbidden by the Constitution to pass any law that interferes with that. But the main stream media and the left are trying to twist this into the Catholic Church, conservatives, and Republicans trying to deny a woman’s access to birth control. But let’s examine what they are really demanding.

What is the purpose of birth control? It is to allow the enjoyment of sex without the fear of the natural purpose of sex, procreation. Okay, so it is not about marriage, it is not about family, it is about fun. The left wants no restrictions on a woman’s access to recreational sex. As a believer in individual liberty, my personal views aside, that’s fine. But don’t make me pay for it! If a woman and her partner cannot afford the $10 for a month’s worth of recreational sex, don’t pick my pocket for it. Get a second job if you have to (we’re talking about 90 minutes per month at minimum wage). Is ObamaCare going to pay for my wine or my green’s fees so I can drink a glass of red for my heart and play a round of golf for exercise? Both of those activities provide better health benefits than sex, and if the two sex partners don’t know themselves that well it can be down right dangerous for them between disease and violence.

The Wrong Direction

Instead of declaring free recreational sex as a right, perhaps it’s time to look at the incontrovertible evidence. President Obama is obsessed with income inequality and yet he goes against the formula for addressing it.  The evidence shows that the formula to get out of poverty and stay out is:

1. Graduate high school
2. Get a job, any job, and stay employed
3. Get married before you have children.

Yet what is this president’s program?

1. Favor teachers over students. Fight school vouchers, fight Scott Walker in Wisconsin trying to get public sector unions under control including teachers.
2. Add crushing regulations and massive spending on to an economy where the official end of the recession was almost three years ago. It doesn’t feel like it because of all the baggage this administration has loaded on it. At the same time in Reagan’s first term, the economy was growing at over 8% compared to this president’s 1%-2%.
3. He gave one good speech on a father’s responsibility, but his signature program ObamaCare is promoting free recreational sex and he and the rest of the Democrats are campaigning on it.

Obama has a better formula, tax the most productive among us. Ever feel like we are living the Decline of the Roman Empire. We may have one last change to stop the train wreck this November.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

What do you do when you can’t run on your record? If you watch the Democrats you will find out. The answer is to manufacture bogus issues out of thin air and try to anger and scare people into voting against dismal Democrat policies.

It was just a short while ago that New York Congressman Tim Bishop introduced a bill called the U.S. Call Center and Consumer Protection Act. Never mind that there are no significant call centers in Bishop’s Congressional district on the east end of Long Island. Never mind that his district is still losing jobs that are unrelated to call centers. This is a top priority of his. Why? Because he thinks that if he can get the topic of outsourcing on the table, he might have a fighting chance of holding his seat, because his opponent doesn’t hold a fourteenth century world view that our economy is confined to our borders. We live in a global economy like it or not and we are able to buy affordable products because some of them are made or serviced in other countries. In a similar vein our economy is able to grow and add jobs because we sell high-end products like Boeing jets to their economies.

The Birth Control Brouhaha

Now we have the national Democrat party trying to manufacture an issue over birth control. For those who have been watching the Republican presidential debates, who wasn’t scratching their heads over George Stephanopoulos’ questions and persistent follow-ups about states regulating contraception. Huh? Where did that come from? Dick Morris seems to have figured it out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcBLSp0RScE

It will not be long before the ads start rolling out that the Republican nominee, whoever that may be, favors states banning contraception. With enough lies and distortion, the Democrats hope to make an issue where none exists. There is no movement to ban contraceptives in this country. But under the Constitution could a state ban them? Yes. (Note that I say under the Constitution, not under an activist Supreme Court that likes to rewrite the Constitution as they go along). So the question asked, will be a Constitutional one, the ad that will follow will be that the Republican candidate favors what the Constitution merely allows. I think the Constitution also allows states to pass laws banning silly hats in public, that doesn’t mean that everyone who believe in the Constitution believes in such laws. It is the electorate’s job to police that nonsense.

The Real Issue

What  is being missed here is the real issue. If contraceptives should be required to be provided and free under ObamaCare, why not toothpaste? Why not soap or deodorant? Band-Aids? Tums? Kleenex? Birth control pills cost about $15-$50 per month, according to Planned Parenthood. For this you need insurance? That is the cost of 2-3 packs of cigarettes, 2-3 gallon jugs of milk. Perhaps if you can’t afford to come up with that much cash, you should learn to play Pinochle until you can. How about splitting the cost with the other partner? Hell, a bottle of wine to get the festivities started will get you half way there.

The real problem is we have lost the concept of insurance. Insurance is designed to prevent a financial catastrophe from striking due to an unforeseen event. Heart attack, cancer, something that is very expensive and very unwelcome. The brouhaha over birth control is like lobbying for your auto insurance to cover your gas purchases, or your life insurance to cover your groceries. It is beyond ridiculous and it will guarantee that health care costs will not be curtailed by ObamaCare but accelerate until either the cost is astronomical or we will have to wait weeks, months, or years for service. There is a reason that you have to wait about three months to get a CT can in Canada today, but if you want to get one for your dog, it will be about three weeks. The CT scan for you is free through government health insurance. The CT scan for your dog is out of your pocket.  It is simple economics; supply and demand. If you fix the price then you have to wait. It may be free, but you could die waiting. Perhaps that’s how ObamaCare plans to save money.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

President Barack Obama has a new budget. So it’s time to suspend reality and listen and nod your head and pine for four more years.

President Obama promised in 2009 to halve the deficit by the end of his first term. The last fiscal year budget deficit under Bush was $482 billion. In the four years of Obama’s first term it has yet to be less than $1 trillion. As former New York City Mayor Ed Koch used to asks his constituents, “How’m I doing?”

So while Obama’s new budget promises another trillion plus deficit, but don’t worry he will cut $4 trillion in spending over the next ten years. Never mind that even if he is reelected 60% of that timeline is beyond his control. It should also be pointed out that $4 trillion over ten years is only $400 billion a year, which leaves another $600 billion to be added to the national debt each year.

If that is not smoke and mirrors enough, that $4 trillion includes $1.5 trillion in tax increases. Why does this president and his backers insist that we have to take more money from the production of America’s citizens to cover his spending, rather than cutting his spending to fit within the available revenues?

For his first two years in office he worked with a Democrat controlled Congress. He got everything he asked for and everything is worse. We have staggering debt despite his promises to cut the deficit in half, unemployment worse than when he took office despite his promises to that his stimulus would cap unemployment at 8%, we have ObamaCare striking right at the heart of the First Amendment and he basically says, “get over it.”

Enough is enough. The experiment failed. It is time to cut this man loose and start working to repair the enormous damage he has done.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.