The Safety Net

“It’s very sad. I think it’s just illustrating what dire straits our federal government budget is in,” said Sheila Zedlewski, director of the Urban Institute’s Income and Benefits Center. “It’s unprecedented to raid one safety net program to feed another.”
Democrats who reluctantly slashed a food stamp program to fund a state aid bill may have to do so again to pay for a top priority of first lady Michelle Obama.
The House will soon consider an $8 billion child nutrition bill that’s at the center of the first lady’s “Let’s Move” initiative. Before leaving for the summer recess, the Senate passed a smaller version of the legislation that is paid for by trimming the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps.

The proposed cuts would come on top of a 13.6 percent food stamp reduction in the $26 billion Medicaid and education state funding bill that President Obama signed this week.
Food stamps have made multiple appearances on the fiscal chopping block because Democrats have few other places to turn to offset the cost of legislation.
Party leaders raided the budget to find off-setting tax increases and spending cuts to pay for their top legislative priorities, including the roughly $900 billion health care law.
Democrats have turned to the food stamp program because funding increases enacted in the stimulus package last year were already scheduled to phase out over time. The changes proposed in the state aid and nutrition bills would simply cut off that increase early, in March 2014. Because the cuts would not take effect for more than three years, Democratic leaders have voiced the hope that they will be able to stop them in future legislation.
But House liberals are balking now, saying that while they swallowed the food stamp cuts to pay for urgent funding for Medicaid and teachers, they will not vote for more cuts in the child nutrition bill.
A House leadership aide noted that the food stamp decrease approved in the state aid bill will not take effect right away and will leave the program at the same funding level it was at before the stimulus law was signed. “That doesn’t mean many Democrats are not concerned about the issue, but this is a process which gives us time to deal with immediate issues (like jobs) and helping the economy grow, while giving you time to deal with the food stamp issue,” the aide said. (The Hill)

In other words, the card shuffling rob Peter-to-Pay-Paul-Wimpy-I’ll Pay you tomorrow for a hamburger (or food stamp)-today economics may be running a bit thin.
The idea that you can pay for massive spending with cuts 3 years from now in the hope that everything will be fine and and you won’t have to cut them in 3 years is some how saving money now is just wrong.
And these were eliminating increases that that they’d already passed!
Sounds like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic after it’s hit the iceberg!
But when you have The Agenda, and the Agenda must be passed and the end justifies the means, you’ll do and say anything to make it happen.

The deeper food stamp reductions in the Senate version would set an earlier date — in November 2013 — for eliminating the increased benefits passed last year.  A family of four would see their benefit reduced by $59 a month, or about 9 percent. The bill would also cut funding for nutrition education programs aimed at low-income neighborhoods and households.
But don’t worry, It will still be George W Bush’s fault if the cuts actually happen. Or evil rich people. Or Class warfare. It certainly won’t be there fault. And it’s just cutting an increase anyhow so no big deal (unless you’re the Bush Tax cuts where not increasing taxes is bad).
The truth is certainly not endangered.


I like this comment made on the article, it was suitably sarcastic:
No big deal. Just put a “cancel” on any payments from the treasury to cover charges for the Obama family’s entertainment amd travel budget. It would onlly take a few months of austerity in the White House to jumpstart the economy, balance the budget, and slash the deficit. If that doesn’t do it, garnish Obama’s salary, eliminate his empire of czars, and fire “Bozo” Gibbs. The first two measures would be sacrifices, and the third would be a sign of at least some intelligent life in the White House.

Now why would they want to interrupt their latest lavish vacation to do that? Gee, they are the elites and they are the ruling family why would they want to show any restraint?
They deserve it. They are better than you.
I guess we could always Eat their words…


Congress’ rationale for eliminating the 2003 Bush tax cuts is deficit reduction. This position would be more credible were congress not teeing-up additional discretionary spending programs in the form of various stimuli packages for union members and favored political allies whom Democrats need to please in order to ensure their re-election in November. The deficit can never be reduced if Congress doesn’t stop non-essential spending. (or this kind of Wimpy-I’ll-pay-tomorrow-for-what-I-spend-today economics).

Currently, it is not clear if the confiscatory tax policies proposed by Democrats are designed to reduce the deficit by increasing the government’s revenue or if they are designed to punish political opponents and those whose don’t share the flawed, Democrat, wealth-redistribution ideology. Increasingly, it’s looking as if the goal is to punish.
Low tax rates incentivize economic growth and investment. This has been proven time after time. But, Democrats prefer to focus, instead, on taxes on the “rich”, using inflammatory rhetoric that plays on our deepest fears and ego, fear that someone might be better than we are, have more than we do, rhetoric that encourages schadenfreude, a smug pleasure that those who have more than we, might be brought low by confiscatory tax policies.
The Democrat leaders in congress advocating against the Bush tax cuts are looking for a bogeyman—the rich—to be blamed for the failed Democrat fiscal and job creation policies. Punishing the “rich” is a campaign strategy that they hope will play well with voters this fall. (Townhall.com)

Let them EAT the “rich”. Meanwhile, the apparatchiks are being porked out of their minds.
And you, get to pay for it either way.


Oh, and just in case you didn’t know, their was another stimulus (aka bribe) recently also:
WASHINGTON (AP) — A check from Uncle Sam gets your attention, even if the money doesn’t help that much with the bills.
More than 750,000 Medicare recipients with high prescription costs each got a $250 government check this summer, and 3 million-plus more checks are going out to people who land in the program’s anxiety-inducing coverage gap.
Democrats, running scared in an election year, are trying to overcome older people’s mistrust of the new health care law, which expands coverage for younger generations by cutting Medicare payments to hospitals and insurers.
Will the ploy work?
“It’s like a teaser,” says Virginia Brant, 65, of Glendale, Ariz. “You go to Vegas and they give you the free spin on the wheel. We have had our teaser — the $250 — for us to say, ‘Gee, look at what we have coming.’”
Brant spent hers to help pay down a credit card she keeps for medications.
The checks arrive with a letter addressed directly to each beneficiary and signed by Kathleen Sebelius, President Barack Obama’s health secretary.
The money is “to bring you some needed relief on your prescription drug costs … the first step toward closing your coverage gap,” Sebelius says. Then comes the pitch: “Stay tuned for more information … on how this new law will help make Medicare more financially secure and provide you with higher quality and more affordable health care.”
Ooh, $250 bucks! Wow! that makes The Health Care Mandate  and the cuts in Medicare Advantage  (which is used for prescriptions mostly ) so much more palatable and makes me want to vote for a Democrat so they can continue to pork people without regard to the consequences!
I guess they could always cut food stamps again to pay for it….
So The democrats want to demagogue the rich, pay off their apparatchiks with your money and bribe people to vote for them in November.
Well at least some things haven’t changed in the swamp.

Putting Government First

I have not always had much love for Pat Buchanan, but this article he wrote recently is brilliant. So I give him props for it.
The Topic: the lastest bailout of Obama apparatchiks (even though they don’t call them bailouts anymore because they don’t “bailout” anyone anymore. I guess it depends on your definition of “bailout”)

Where a man’s purse is, there his heart will be also.
If you would know where the heart of the Obama party is today, consider. In the dog days of August, with temperatures in D.C. rising above 100, Nancy Pelosi called the House back to Washington to enact legislation that could not wait until September.
Purpose: Vote $26 billion to prevent layoffs of state, municipal and county employees whose own governments had decided they had to be let go if they were to meet their constitutional duty to balance their books.
Workers their own governments thought expendable, Congress decided were so essential, it borrowed another 26 thousand million dollars from China to keep them on state and local payrolls.

//

A nation whose national debt is approaching the size of its gross national product, that goes abroad to borrow money to keep non-essential workers on government payroll is a nation on the way down and out.
And anyone who thinks this Obama party is ever going to cull the armies of tens of millions of government workers or scores of millions of government beneficiaries to put America’s house in order is deluding himself.
As long as this Congress and White House remain in power, a U.S. default on its national debt is inevitable. The only question is when.
Nor is this the first time the Obama administration has rushed to save workers whom their own state, city and county governments were prepared to let go. Among the reasons the $800 billion stimulus failed is that so little of it was directed to firing up the locomotive of the economy, the private sector, and so much of it was spent to ensure that government workers did not have to share in the national sacrifice.
Why Pelosi & Co felt compelled to return to D.C., to ensure that state and local government payrolls were not pared, is not hard to understand.
Which party does the American Federation of Teachers; the National Education Association; and the American Federation of State, Municipal and County Employees usually contribute to, work for, vote for? At which of the two party conventions are teachers and government employees hugely over-represented?
Consider, too, the states deepest in debt and facing the largest cuts in employee ranks, pay and benefits: California, Illinois, New York.
In these states, public employees earn at least $10,000 per year more in pay and benefits than the average America worker, who is bailing them out.
Hence, we have a situation where private sector workers in Middle America are being taxed, their children being driven ever deeper into debt to China, so government employees who have greater job security than they do, and earn more in pay and benefits than they will ever earn, can stay in Fat City.
And folks wonder why so many Americans detest government.
In the same week Congress came back to prevent AFSCME from taking a haircut, the Wall Street Journal reported that, in 2009, only three of 52 metro areas with over 1 million in population saw “net earnings and the broader measure of personal income both rise.”
Are you surprised to learn Washington, D.C., was among the three?
That same day, USA Today had a startling report on how, during the last decade, U.S. Government workers, like Wall Street bankers, left their fellow Americans in the dust.
“Federal workers have been awarded bigger average pay and benefit increases than private employees for nine years in a row. The compensation gap between federal and private workers has doubled in the past decade.
“Federal civil servants earned average pay and benefits of $123,049 in 2009 while private workers made $61,051 in total compensation. … The Federal compensation advantage has grown from $30,415 in 2000 to $61,998 last year.”
Remarkable. U.S. government workers, who enjoy the greatest job security of any Americans, now earn twice as much in pay and benefits as the average American. This is not the D.C. some of us grew up in.
Nor is this all Obama’s doing. For most of the fat years of the federal work force came while Washington was being run by a Congress of Big-Government Conservatives and a White House of Bush-Cheney Republicans.
No wonder the tea party is targeting both parties.
Nevertheless, it is impossible to believe that the Obamaites, who intervened twice and massively with bailouts to prevent minor layoffs of local and state government employees, have the stomach to do the major surgery needed to cut the federal monolith down to size.
For the vast majority of the tens of millions of government workers vote Democratic, as do the vast majority of the scores of millions of beneficiaries of federal, state and local programs.
What Pelosi & Co. were saying with that $26 billion bailout this week is, “We are going to protect our own.”
Which is why either Obama, Pelosi, Reid & Co. go, or we are gone. (Human events).

Brilliantly said.
Especially, in light of the “payment” for that government employee bailout was to raid Food Stamps in 2014.
What I called a few days ago a the Wimpy (from Popeye) style economics. I will pay you in four years (china) for the burger (bailout) today.
A bailout several states didn’t even need or want!
It’s largess for everyone in government, on the tax payers paid for by China. (Do you actually think in 2014 with the Health Care Mandate kicking people in the teeth that they will cut Food Stamps? Yeah right…)
Obama has to protect his apparatchiks though.
Screw everyone else.

The Reverse Trojan Manuever

While campaigning in Nevada Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told an audience of mostly Hispanic voters: “I don’t know how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican, okay. Do I need to say more?”

No, please, Harry, just shut up!  For your own good.
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Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the man spearheading the Ground Zero Mosque initiative, is about to take a month-long trip through the Middle East sponsored by the U.S. government.

No wonder Mayor Bloomberg and the Democrats don’t want to do anything about a mosque 600ft from Ground Zero!
He’s already an apparatchik and we know how this administration treats it’s apparatchiks.

So you have radical Iman who believe American was complicit in 9/11 and wants Sharia law compliance and does not think Hamas is a terrorist organization (even though in there charter it says multiple time “Kill all the Jews”. Look it up sometime) and that dialogue amongst religions is a wast of time  and is a key figure in the Malaysia-based Perdana Global Peace Organization, which helped sponsor the six-ship flotilla that tried to break Israel’s blockade of the Hamas-run Gaza Strip.
So I guess this fall under if you’re going to bed down with a nest of vipers, better to have your own viper. But this one wants to bite you in the ass too!


“He is a distinguished Muslim cleric,” said State Department Spokesman P.J. Crowley. “We do have a program whereby, through our Educational and Cultural Affairs Bureau here at the State Department, we send people from Muslim communities here in this country around the world to help people overseas understand our society and the role of religion within our society.”
So to explain how the role of religion works in America you send a radical Muslim cleric who believes in compliance with Sharia law??
Didn’t they just get the memo about the most radical Muslims, the Taliban, killing aid workers for the mere crime of being Christians?
Send a Wolf in Wolf’s clothing to do the Sheep’s Job?

So is Obama trying to say that we can embrace a radical who would destroy us, so that shows our tolerance, please like us and don’t kill us infidels?
Probably, it sounds like liberal logic. My head hurts.

“It is to foster greater understanding and outreach around the world, among… Muslim- majority communities,” said Crowley. “We’ve done this many, many times, with many leading figures… over the past few years.”

But know we know why they lack of outrage, except from the American people on the Ground Zero Mosque. It’s probably a part of this whole deal, a pay off.
And besides, if the normal unwashed peasant masses are against it, that must mean the Political Elites are in on it “for our own good”.


While there’s no shortage of potentially eloquent ambassadors who could convey to the world the majority sentiment in America, the best man for the job is probably Greg Gutfeld, whose proposal to build a Muslim-friendly gay bar consider[ing] the sensibilities” of one’s neighbors next to the Ground Zero mosque is doing wonders to foster a dialogue about ” (Weekly Standard)

How about a Women’s Center next to that. And Christian Church across the Street (more on that later). Maybe even a Tea Party office too. 
We’re all neighbors after all, and can get along, right…
Next up:  Sending The American Taliban, John Walker Lind to be Ambassador to Afghanistan.
Gitmo Detainees as ambassadors to the Middle East.
The Son of the pilot of the Enola Gay that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima as Ambassador to Japan.
An anti-Semite Democrat (there are sooo many) be Ambassador to Israel.
It all makes perfect sense doesn’t it!

It's a Reverse Trojan Horse, when the Trojans let the Greeks built the Horse INSIDE Troy and then act surprised when the soldiers jump out of it and attack them in the middle of the night!
Now that demonstrates our tolerance doesn't it!  Never look a Gift Horse, even a Trojan one, in the Mouth. :)

Like the fabled Trojan Horse, the Cordoba Mosque is touted as an offering of friendship and a chance for us to show our tolerance. But its march toward construction has been marked with deceit, fraud and double standards.

Before Islamofascists turned passenger jets into cruise missiles and toppled the World Trade Center, mosques and Islamic cultural centers dotted America. Not a single Christian church exists in Saudi Arabia. We've shown our tolerance. We do not need to show our naivete.

As the New York Post has discovered, one of the parcels the mosque is to be built on is owned by Con Edison, even though Soho Properties told officials and the public it owned all the land. Soho only leases the property. Con Edison mysteriously kept quiet all this time, perhaps at the urging of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, for whom the mosque is a high priority.

It's certainly a higher priority than St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, which used to be right across the street from the WTC until it was crushed when Tower 2 and its incinerated inhabitants came crashing down on it.

Plans to rebuild St. Nicholas two blocks from its original location fell apart when Port Authority officials objected to its 24,000-square-foot footprint with a traditional grand dome that they said could not rise higher than the planned WTC memorial. Yet no objection was raised to a 13-story mosque on which no height restrictions were placed.

It's not as if there are no Islamic centers of worship in New York City. The Islamic Society-Mid-Manhattan is located on 55th Street. There's the Islamic Cultural Center of New York on Third Avenue and the Assafa Islamic Center on Allen Street in lower Manhattan.

Incredibly, the Landmarks Commission denied landmark status to one of the buildings on the site, the Burlington Coat Factory building, into which crashed the landing gear from one of the 9/11 planes. Will the mosque have a plaque marking the spot? We doubt it.

Inside, the mosque won't be Greek soldiers to lay waste to Troy, but Shariah law and its advocates to wage war on a Western civilization they despise. Mosques have served as recruiting and even training centers for terrorism.

Germany has wisely closed Hamburg's Taiba mosque, once frequented by some of the Sept. 11 attackers. It was searched by police and shut down because German authorities believed it was again being used as a meeting point for Islamist radicals. Mohamed Atta, as well as fellow 9/11 murderers Marwan Al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah, had studied in Hamburg and frequented the mosque.

Neda Bolourchi, a Muslim whose mother died when the plane she was in slammed into the WTC's north tower, wrote in the Washington Post that "a mosque near ground zero will not move this conversation forward." But "over time, it will cultivate a fundamentalist version of the Muslim faith," a version that cultivated 9/11.

Canadian Muslims Raheel Raza and Tarek Fatah, who sit on the board of the Muslim Canadian Congress, wrote in the Ottawa Citizen of Aug. 7: "We Muslims know that the idea behind the ground zero mosque is meant to be a deliberate provocation to thumb our noses at the infidel." Or a 13-story middle finger.

Build the memorial, not the mosque. And about that Christian church in Saudi Arabia. (IBD)

Is that a pig flying by my window? :)