WUI (Writing under the influence)

Democrat says health overhaul needs GOP to pass

What? You don't have enough votes to do whatever you want? Are you willing to acknowledge that Republicans have never had the same majorities and managed to accomplished something? And, more importantly, are you willing to acknowledge that having majorities doesn't mean you can prevent a housing bubble from bursting?

Now’s the time to cast off collective bargaining agreements and introduce school choice.

It is somewhat satisfying to see an attempt at race baiting blow up in president's face.

It is also deliciously ironic that he who promised us post-racial politics is suffering the consequences of playing the old game. Many people voted for him knowing he was wrong on almost anything but hoping his election would end politics of race.

How wrong they were.

UPDATE: This cartoon says it all.

If there was any doubt who caused the current financial crisis, Obama put it to rest with his press conference tonight. By protesting that the so called health care reform can't pass because Republicans are stonewalling it, Obama finally acknowledged that having absolute power in term of party identification is not enough to pass a controversial piece of legislation. In fact, anybody with a room-temperature IQ (and remember, it's global warming so it's pretty hot) will recognize that if Obama can't ram through anything through the Congress now, how could poor Bush have changed anything when he barely had any majority during his 8 years, and that so called majority included such "conservatives" as Snowe, Collins and Specter who has switched to a Democrat such was his loyalty to conservative ideals?

Bush tried to save social security, he tried to stop Fanny Mea and Freddy Mac from lending money to complete losers (a.k.a. Democrat voters) and now he's being blamed for having caused this mess. But people forget that Barnie Frank and Chris Dodd stood in his way because Republicans simply didn't have enough votes to do anything.

If Obama can't do anything (thank God) with all these do-gooders in power and the media blindly supporting him, what could Bush have done?

This is one of those things I really don't get about Americans. Horses are not pets. And the comment about "eating horses = eating humans" is just plain stupid. The funny thing is that we are supposed to be so open minded to other cultures. I don't want to live in France or Italy but on this one topic they are right: horse meat is just delicious, especially the carpaccio style. I'd also tell you more about my trip to China and dogs....

I wasn't sure how long one is supposed to wait before saying anything bad about somebody who just died. I know many on the left didn't wait 5 minutes after Reagan died but I'm talking about normal people. So I wanted to wait maybe a week to say that Cronkite never apologized for having lost the Vietnam war and for millions who perished in the aftermath.

I didn't realize that it only takes 3 days of respect before somebody can write
"Walter Cronkite Has Blood on His Hands"

At least fewer and fewer people trust in what they are told by so called newsmen anymore. Just as Carter gave us Reagan, Cronkite gave us talk radio and Fox News, and may eventually kill NYT, ABC, CBS, etc.

If Palin said we need to spend money to avoid bankruptcy she would be loughed out of Alaska if she hadn't resigned.

I'm telling my kids to leave the US and to feel guilty about it if the state takes more than 51% of what they make. Not that 50% 45% even 30% are much better. But at 51% I'm no longer a free individual. I'm a slave of the state. If the US doesn't build a fence to keep people out, in 50 years it may build a fence to keep people in.

Also, they should leave if they have to support geezers who today we are over-populated but at the same time vote for more taxes on the young ones so they can have their heap replacements.

The transformation of developed societies — either into old folks' homes (like Japan) or semi-Islamized dystopias (like Amsterdam, Brussels, etc) — will lead, in fact, to emigration. A young German or Japanese circa 2040 will have no reason whatsoever to stay in his native land and have most of his income confiscated in a vain attempt to prop up an unsustainable geriatric welfare system. So many will leave. Where will they go? At one time the obvious answer would have been America — but Good King Barack seems determined to saddle us with the same unaffordable entitlements that have scuttled the rest of the west.

Mark Steyn

"We're going to go bankrupt as a nation. People, when I say that, look at me and say, 'What are you talking about, Joe? You're telling me we have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt?' The answer is yes."--Joe Biden, July 16

Whether fabricated or real, a major economic crisis is what Democrats use most effectively for political gains. By blaming the rich in particular and capitalism in general, they manage to convince many people that Republicans are somehow at fault. Of course, aided and abetted by sycophantic media and academia, Democrats never acknowledge that their own misguided policies cause most economic hardships.

Playing on people’s fears, Democrats declare national emergencies. They call for creation of new programs and government bureaucracies. Then, over a few election cycles, demonizing and destroying anybody in their way, whipping up mindless class-warfare or environmental-disaster hysteria, Democrats turn these new programs into unsustainable entitlements and economy killing regulatory agencies.

When overregulated and overtaxed private markets can’t pay fast enough for the growing dependent class and hordes of government bureaucrats, Democrats take the nation deeper and deeper into debt. Then, predictably, instead of blaming their lust for political power and their constituencies’ greed for taxpayers’ money, Democrats point the finger at the so called “military industrial complex” and the “wars for oil.” Sometimes, they just yell ‘Yes, we can!’ loud enough to win another election.

Democrats made impressive electoral gains last November by taking advantage of a crisis of their own creation. As usual they blamed Republicans and promised to fix it all. But instead of helping the ailing economy, they spent trillions of dollars in bailouts to pay off government lackeys, unions and Wall Street donors. Despite promises to the contrary, the economy is still in shambles with no signs of recovery while the private sector hemorrhages hundreds of thousands of jobs every month.

Many people who voted for this “hope and change” start waking up to the deception. Democrats can’t rely anymore on the media and washed up university professors to make the case for their policies because even the most faithful can’t logically refute that the depression-level unemployment is now solely Democrats’ fault. So, concerned about the next year elections, Democrats are going back to their old playbook: make more people dependent on government.
After having regulated the health care sector for decades, Democrats insist that the only cure for the skyrocketing health care costs is more government intervention. Never mind that over the years they saddled private insurance carriers with mandates of questionable medical value. Ironically, Medicare and state-run health insurance schemes have to limit services they cover and they still run huge deficits.

The new program Democrats propose, innocently called “public option,” will probably start small. But inevitably, after choking off private competition, it will turn into another monster that will have to be fed a steady diet of huge tax increases with rationing and scarcity of medical services to follow.

If that weren’t bad enough, Democrats are ramming through the Congress their “cap and trade” energy bill. Based on unproven and shoddy science, the bill mandates limits and huge taxes on reliable energy sources such as coal, oil and nuclear power to supposedly make solar, wind, and other expensive and inefficient technologies more competitive. With absolutely no impact on the climate, this scheme, in addition to costing Americans millions in higher utility bills, will destroy countless manufacturing jobs when American companies start moving abroad to look for cheaper energy.

But Democrats don’t worry. They know people who lose jobs, who can’t pay their bills are easily persuaded that free markets simply don’t work and that government is the only answer. Democrats promise to spread the wealth around but the only thing they do well is spread a lot of misery while taking our liberties in the process.

Why would you sell Honduras and Poland if you weren't either a commie or a coward?

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said in an interview published Sunday that the United States must compromise on plans for a missile defense system in Europe to get a deal on cutting back nuclear warheads.

Can you walk out of any negotiations the way Reagan did?

And please, don't use Walesa's name to prove your point. Walesa loved Reagan. In fact, Walesa thinks Poland is free because of Reagan.

I distinguish between two kinds of politicians. There are those who view politics as a tactical game, a game in which they do not reveal any individuality, in which they lose their own face. There are, however, leaders for whom politics is a means of defending and furthering values. For them, it is a moral pursuit. They do so because the values they cherish are endangered. They're convinced that there are values worth living for, and even values worth dying for. Otherwise they would consider their life and work pointless. Only such politicians are great politicians and Ronald Reagan was one of them.

You would have sold Poland then they way you are selling it now while kissing Ruskies' asses. I never had much respect for you. I have none now. In fact, you owe me some.

Obviously I was rooting for the family in this Supreme Court case even if their win is to some extent my loss since some taxes I pay go to the Forest Grove school district. But I have mixed feelings about the outcome anyway. Why is it that only children with disabilities should be treated this way? I'm sending my children to a private school because they are also special. Maybe they are just special to me. Maybe they are special because they are too smart to be in public schools. Who cares? The law should be simple: each family sends its children to any school it deems appropriate. Who pays for it? Preferably the family itself. But because we have this draconian system where the state takes money from me by force to then let me educate my children in a government-run school, the second best option would be if I were able to take the money the state would spent on my children and send my them wherever I wanted and pay the difference (unlikely, since I already pay less than the state would have) if necessary.


UPDATE: I've read Saunders's column and I think she misses the point. It's not about how wacky the parents are and whether this kid really needed a special school. Children should not be forced into government schools. Period. If, for whatever reason, parents thing their kids would be better off by attending that school or another, they should be able to make that choice. And that was my point: my children are special to me and I think they should not attend government schools. But I end up paying for this decision and I believe that at minimum, for as long as they are in school, I shouldn't be required to pay taxes to send somebody else's kids to school.

As a compromise, I would be willing to limit parents' choices to charter schools. Unfortunately they also face backlash from the teacher unions. We need more people like this guy.

Tom Menino, the longtime Democratic mayor of this city, is not known for rocking the boat or for eloquence. But earlier this month he stunned many in the city when he gave a powerful speech about school reform.

The speech took aim at the lack of progress in dozens of low-performing, inner-city Boston public schools, many of which have not met adequate yearly progress for five years running.

"To get the results we seek -- at the speed we want -- we must make transformative changes that boost achievement for students, improve quality choices for parents, and increase opportunities for teachers," Mr. Menino said. "We need to empower our educators to quickly innovate and implement what works." With that, Mr. Menino abandoned nearly two decades of personal opposition to nonunion charter schools, which have been bitterly resisted by Massachusetts teachers unions and their political allies. "I believe that the increased flexibility that charters provide can . . . help us close the achievement gap," he declared.

Wal-Mart is playing government to eliminate the competition and Democrats are apparently very happy. Not because they wish well to Wal-Mart but because they don't understand what's Wal-Mart's reasons are. What Democrats don't want to understand is that every human is greedy. And it's normal. And they will never change it.

"Look, a rule of thumb here is whenever you find yourself on the side of Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega, and the Castro twins, you ought to reexamine your assumptions." -- Charles Krauthammer

"Is politics some kind of affirmative-action program for sociopaths?" -- Mark Steyn

I thought it was because Republicans didn't control how loans were made to people who couldn't afford it and those loans were for more than houses were really worth. So why the hell are we doing this again?

Freddie Mac announced Wednesday that it would offer loan-to-value ratios on home mortgage refinancings of up to 125 percent for qualified borrowers.

The announcement comes as the Obama administration raised the maximum allowable loan-to-value (LTV) ratio from 105 percent.

The answer is clear. Democrats did it then and they are doing it now to create more mischief.