Incestuous Narcissism Part 2

indyfromaz|

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. -Old Chinese Proverb.

And these days not only do people get fish, they demand that you catch it for them and/or “the rich” give them their fish because it’s only “fair”.
And if that fish isn’t good enough for them they will throw it back until they get a bigger, better fish that THEY like!
Unemployment insurance prior to the Age of Obama was for 26 weeks. 6 months and was only meant to help you out in between jobs. Not be de-facto welfare.
Or a stimulus, if you remember what Speaker Pelosi said in July 2010:
“Let me say that unemployment insurance… is one of the biggest stimuluses (sic) to our economy. Economists will tell you, this money is spent quickly. It injects demand into the economy, and it’s job creating. It creates jobs faster than almost any other initiative you can name.”
So unemployment is good for everyone! So nearly 10% unemployment is great!
Aren’t you happy? Don’t you have lots of Hope!?
Now it stretch to 2 YEARS or more. Because Democrats have made finding a job so hard they have to cover their own buts by bribing people.
They call it “compassion”. I call it a bribe. Democrats are very good at paternalistic bribes.
The government pays you not to work. You in turn don’t bother looking. And if you aren’t looking you aren’t one of the statistics on Unemployment numbers because you aren’t looking.
Thus, the government can keep it artificially lower than it already is. Which is very high indeed.
So the Unemployment rate is just another political game to be manipulated.
Meanwhile, you have people just sitting around eating Doritos and hanging out doing nothing and getting paid for it!
And the government doesn’t make it easy to get off the dole either. Whether on purpose or not.
In the first year of unemployment, the size of the benefit check is based on your old salary. You can go right back on unemployment after a temp job, and nothing changes. But federal law requires states to recalculate benefits for the second year. If you worked a few days or a few months, the second year’s checks will be based on that lower earnings total. (Hartford Courant)

So you’re on unemployment, you get a temp job, your benefits get cut. So the obvious answer is to not take the temp job, right?
The government makes you want to stay.
But now Ms. Hanson rues the day she took that work. Why? The Connecticut Department of Labor used her negligible earnings in her part-time job as the new baseline for Hanson’s unemployment benefits. She went from receiving $483 a week to getting nothing.
“Afterwards, unofficially, they said I shouldn’t have taken the job,” Hanson says. (CSM)
Incentives to stay unemployed. Incestuous you might ask? At least I would.
Employers and economists point to several explanations. Extending jobless benefits to 99 weeks gives the unemployed less incentive to search out new work. Millions of homeowners are unable to move for a job because the real-estate collapse leaves them owing more on their homes than they are worth.
The job market itself also has changed. During the crisis, companies slashed millions of middle-skill, middle-wage jobs. That has created a glut of people who can’t qualify for highly skilled jobs but have a hard time adjusting to low-pay, unskilled work…
Many of the applicants he (Mark Sperry of Catepillar) saw at job fairs, he says, were just going through the motions so they could collect their unemployment checks. Some workers agree that unemployment benefits make them less likely to take whatever job comes along, particularly when those jobs don’t pay much. Michael Hatchell, a 52-year-old mechanic in Lumberton, N.C., says he turned down more than a dozen offers during the 59 weeks he was unemployed, because they didn’t pay more than the $450 a week he was collecting in benefits.
It is particularly troubling at a time when 4.3% of the labor force has been out of work for more than six months—a level much higher than after any other recession since 1948. (WSJ)
So what are you to do if Unemployment pays better than the job?
Just game the system.
And the system shall provide.
The disconnect between workers and jobs could constrain the economy for some time. It makes it hard for even small firms, which as a group typically account for an outsize share of job growth in a rebound. (WSJ)
So if you have 99 weeks of unemployment, you go out “looking” for a job but not really, then when it gets to about 95 weeks you get serious about it. But that’s nearly 2 years later!
There was a Swedish study that when they cut the benefit time, the amount of time people kept “looking” decreased in proportion.
Alan Krueger, the current Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and a highly respected labor economist has said in his academic writing exactly that: unemployment insurance causes the unemployed to stay unemployed longer.
In his academic studies Dr. Krueger wrote that “more generous unemployment insurance (UI) benefits have been found to be associated with longer spells of unemployment,” and further finds that “the job finding rate jumps up around the time benefits are exhausted. Most importantly, we find that job search intensity is inversely related to UI benefit generosity for those who are eligible for UI.” In other words, a senior Obama administration official finds that less generous UI benefits cause the unemployed to search harder for new work.
Lawrence Summers, Director of the White House’s National Economic Council has said the same:
“government assistance programs contribute to long-term unemployment by providing an incentive, and the means, not to work. Each unemployed person has a ‘reservation wage’—the minimum wage he or she insists on getting before accepting a job. Unemployment insurance and other social assistance programs increase [the] reservation wage, causing an unemployed person to remain unemployed longer.”
“Public policy designed to help workers who lose their jobs can lead to structural unemployment as an unintended side effect. . . . In other countries, particularly in Europe, benefits are more generous and last longer. The drawback to this generosity is that it reduces a worker’s incentive to quickly find a new job.”-Liberal Economist Paul Krugman’s Macroeconomics textbook.
The Same Paul Krugman  recently described Sen. Jon Kyl’s (R-AZ) statement that unemployment insurance causes individuals to stay out of work longer “a bizarre point of view.”(Heritage.org)
More specifically, In the NY Times:  In Mr. Kyl’s view, then, what we really need to worry about right now — with more than five unemployed workers for every job opening, and long-term unemployment at its highest level since the Great Depression — is whether we’re reducing the incentive of the unemployed to find jobs. To me, that’s a bizarre point of view — but then, I don’t live in Mr. Kyl’s universe.
So, like everything with Liberals, it’s all politics.
We, The Democrats, who have the patent on “compassion” will kiss your behind and let you sit on your ass for 2 years. As long as those evil Republicans don’t come in and demand you have some self-respect that is.
Even if they do, the Democrats will trot out their “grandma eating dog food” “they want to cut you off” “they’re heartless” “mean” “Cruel” class warfare hoaries anyhow.
Or as Mr. Krugman put it, “How can the parties agree on policy when they have utterly different visions of how the economy works, when one party feels for the unemployed, while the other weeps over affluent victims of the “death tax”?
Democrats feel your pain (good,sense they are the cause of most of it!). And Republicans are heartless, greedy and obsessed with the kiss up to “the rich”.
Meanwhile, you sit on your behind for up to 2 years eating Doritos and watching Judge Judy.
Who are you going to vote for, the pimp or Mom who says get you lazy ass off the couch?
Unemployment has become a political weapon and a tool, akin to welfare.
You don’t work, we pay you. You vote for us, we keep paying you.
Regardless of the economic and social cost.
Unemployment insurance exists for good reason, and no-one has suggested abolishing it. However, the good that it does also comes with a cost in delaying the return of the unemployed to work. Economists from right to left and in the Obama administration agree about this. Wishing it were not so does not make it true. Congress should consider both the costs and benefits of extended UI benefits when weighing how many years of benefits to provide unemployed workers. (Heritage).
But what we have now is incest at it’s best.

Clowns to the Left of Us…

indyfromaz|

Want to know how serious the Democrats are about border security and immigration?

Well, let’s invite a comedian to do his testimony in front of a live Congressional Committee (estimated to cost $125,000 taxpayers) to mock the whole idea of immigrant labor on farms.
This ain’t no Elmo moment, this was a serious mockery of Congress and immigration.
With joblessness near double digits, federal spending hurtling us toward national bankruptcy and an Islamic terror regime seeking nukes, what is Congress doing? Taking testimony from comedians.
What was Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., thinking when she invited Comedy Central’s faux right-wing pundit Stephen Colbert to appear — “in character”! — before her House Judiciary subcommittee on immigration?
But what does she care? She’s a 15-year incumbent whose San Jose district is so far to the left that she routinely gets re-elected with over 70% of the vote.
WASHINGTON – Taking his blowhard comedy act to Congress, Stephen Colbert told lawmakers that a day picking beans alongside illegal immigrants convinced him that farm work is “really, really hard.”
“It turns out — and I did not know this — most soil is at ground level,” Colbert testified Friday. Also, “It was hotter than I like to be.”
Still, Colbert expressed befuddlement that more Americans aren’t clamoring to “begin an exciting career” in the fields and instead are leaving the low-paid work to illegal immigrants.
Staying in character as a Comedy Central news commentator, Colbert offered a House hearing his “vast” knowledge, drawn from spending a single day on a New York farm as a guest of the United Farm Workers.
The union launched its “Take Our Jobs” campaign to back up its claim that few Americans would do the work of farm laborers, the vast majority of whom are in the U.S. illegally. Only seven people accepted the jobs, the union said.
Colbert pleaded with lawmakers to do something about the farm labor issue because “I am not going back out there.”
A House bill that creates a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants has been filed and another is being drafted in the Senate but Congress is due to recess soon to focus on fall elections. The bills, or pieces of them, could come up in a lame-duck session after the November balloting.
As the immigration subcommittee hearing began, House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers praised Colbert for drawing a roomful of onlookers and photographers. Then he asked the comedian to leave the room — and to leave the job of testifying to the expert witnesses, including Farm Workers President Arturo Rodriguez.
“You run your show, we run the committee,” said Conyers, D-Mich.
Congressional committees frequently invite entertainment or sports personalities to testify on specific issues in an attempt to draw media attention. Colbert has no background or expertise in either farm labor issues or immigration policy.
Colbert said he was there at the invitation of subcommittee Chairwoman Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif. And Conyers later gave him the go-ahead, apparently hoping Colbert’s performance would counter the testimony of a political science professor who said illegal immigrants were competing with black and Hispanic citizens for jobs.
Colbert wiped his brow and launched into his mock right-wing schtick, demanding that lawmakers do something about the agriculture industry’s dependence on immigrant labor.
“I’m not a fan of the government doing anything,” Colbert insisted. “But I’ve got to ask, Why isn’t the government doing anything?”
Colbert’s humor drew guffaws from the audience and several Democrats on the subcommittee. But most of the Republicans sat stone-faced.
“Maybe we should be spending less time watching Comedy Central and more time considering all the real jobs that are out there,” said Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa.
At the close of the hearing, Colbert dropped his TV persona and turned serious, saying he was using his celebrity to bring attention to farm labor because “these seem to be the least of my brothers.”
“Right now migrant workers suffer and have no rights,” Colbert said.
The Insufferably Morally and Intellectual Left was taking the mickey out of you. They were mocking you. They are so far above you that you can’t even comprehend how brilliant this was…
Lofgren is also chairwoman of the House Homeland Security Committee’s subcommittee on border, maritime and global counterterrorism. So maybe we’ll soon hear Robin Williams’ take on countering terrorists sneaking in from Mexico.
The big question, presumably, is whether Lofgren will ask Williams and Carrey to appear as themselves, or as Mork the space alien and Carrey’s dopey character from “Dumb and Dumber.”
Big automatic tax increases loom. Afghanistan’s not going too well. Iran may soon have atomic weapons. You’d think Democrats holding such high positions of responsibility had more pressing things to do than listen to jokesters.

Oh, and the vote to stop the LARGEST TAX INCREASE IN AMERICA HISTORY on 1/1/11, The Democrats don’t really care enough.
Comedians doing faux testimony and ad hominem attack ads are far more compelling.

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) - U.S. House Republican leader John Boehner is criticizing Democratic leaders in Congress for postponing a vote on extending Bush-era tax cuts until after the Nov. 2 election.

But they are way smarter than you. That's why they are going to be trotting out the "grandma eating dog food" and "starving your kids" and "killing grandma" and "stealing your check"  class warfare BS, et al.

FEAR IS HOPE

Poisoning The Well With Lame Duck

The Democrats are expected to lose big, especially in the House, in November.
Their hierarchy is made  up of very petty partisans who will do anything for their agenda.
They are the ones who have total disrespect for everyone who disagrees with them.
So faced with nearly inevitable annihilation that even they think is coming.
What can they do in the less than 4 months left before their power is diminished before the rampaging hoardes of barbarian Tea Partiers and Satan’s army incarnate, The Republicans,  storm the gates of their rightful power.
What any villager or Military in olden times did.
POISON THE WELL.
Do as much damage in a short amount of time as to make the incoming Congress’s job as tough as possible.
Likely, so in 2012′s Presidential Campaign Obama can claim that “well we tried it their way but it hasn’t gotten any better” because you know that if the House goes Republican (and possibly the Senate) that the Democrats who have been yelling about Republican “Obstructionism” for the last 18 months will now pivot and become the champion of  “No”.
And “NO!” will become a virtue again. And you know the Mainstream Media will be on the “Hell No!” bandwagon.
Meanwhile, their Health care provisions and taxes and the 2011 taxes will, of course, be “republican’s fault” after all they were in power when they hit. So it has to be their fault, doesn’t it.
The Democrats aren’t petty.
And the Mainstream Media isn’t in bed with them and won’t go from kiss-ass to a pack of veracious 24/7  raptors overnight.
No, that would never happen.
Democratic House members are so worried about the fall elections they’re leaving Washington on July 30, a full week earlier than normal—and they won’t return until mid-September. Members gulped when National Journal’s Charlie Cook, the Beltway’s leading political handicapper, predicted last month “the House is gone,” meaning a GOP takeover. He thinks Democrats will hold the Senate, but with a significantly reduced majority.
The rush to recess gives Democrats little time to pass any major laws. That’s why there have been signs in recent weeks that party leaders are planning an ambitious, lame-duck session to muscle through bills in December they don’t want to defend before November. Retiring or defeated members of Congress would then be able to vote for sweeping legislation without any fear of voter retaliation.\
“I’ve got lots of things I want to do” in a lame duck, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D., W. Va.) told reporters in mid June. North Dakota’s Kent Conrad, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, wants a lame-duck session to act on the recommendations of President Obama’s deficit commission, which is due to report on Dec. 1. “It could be a huge deal,” he told Roll Call last month. “We could get the country on a sound long-term fiscal path.” By which he undoubtedly means new taxes in exchange for extending some, but not all, of the Bush-era tax reductions that will expire at the end of the year.
Mind you, the commission recommendation is a forgone conclusion. Higher Taxes,  even the VAT tax is not unlikely.
After all, it’s job is to deflect blame away from Obama and Congress to begin with.
Why not, they have nothing to lose.
And Democrats, especially Progressive Socialist Democrats, aren’t petty and vindictive now are they…:)
In the House, Arizona Rep. Raul Grijalva, co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told reporters last month that for bills like “card check”—the measure to curb secret-ballot union elections—”the lame duck would be the last chance, quite honestly, for the foreseeable future.”
Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, chair of the Senate committee overseeing labor issues, told the Bill Press radio show in June that “to those who think [card check] is dead, I say think again.” He told Mr. Press “we’re still trying to maneuver” a way to pass some parts of the bill before the next Congress is sworn in.
Other lame-duck possibilities? Senate ratification of the New Start nuclear treaty, a federally mandated universal voter registration system to override state laws (got to have even more potential for Democrats to foster voter fraud in 2012), and a budget resolution to lock in increased agency spending. (poison the well) Deficits, we’ll show you deficits!
Then there is pork. A Senate aide told me that “some of the biggest porkers on both sides of the aisle are leaving office this year, and a lame-duck session would be their last hurrah for spending.” Likely suspects include key members of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Congress’s “favor factory,” such as Pennsylvania Democrat Arlen Specter and Utah Republican Bob Bennett.
Conservative groups such as FreedomWorks are alarmed at the potential damage, and they are demanding that everyone in Congress pledge not to take up substantive legislation in a post-election session. “Members of Congress are supposed to represent their constituents, not override them like sore losers in a lame-duck session,” Rep. Tom Price, head of the Republican Study Committee, told me.
But these are they guys who rammed Health Care down your throat even if to this day a majority are against it.
They are suing the State of Arizona for their own Open Borders mentality even though a majority of Americans are against it.
They continue to spend like drugged-out addicts.
Why wouldn’t they take one final shot of that pork heroin.
The Democrats have the chance to push as much of their Agenda without consequence to them personally as possible. Why wouldn’t they do it?
I wouldn’t even put Amnesty off the table.
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (Calif.), one of the GOP’s staunchest opponents of illegal immigration, warned that President Barack Obama might seek immigration reform after this fall’s elections, and urged lawmakers running for reelection to pledge not to move such legislation during a lame-duck Congress.

“If you listen to the debate, since the president’s speech, and now you look at this action by his Justice Department, what we can expect is that after the next elections, in between before the next Congress is sworn in, they will move and try to do something dramatic in the area of illegal immigration,” Rohrabacher said during an interview with a conservative radio syndicate.
So we have initiatives to create even more voter fraud, we have Amnesty for new Democrat voters.
They wouldn’t be trying to steal 2012 and future elections now would they?
Nah, they aren’t that cynical and power mad now are they.
Got a Global Warming PR problem, no problem a Lame Duck can’t fix.
“Last night President Obama reiterated his call for comprehensive energy and climate legislation to break our dependence on oil and fossil fuels. Next week he will be reaching out to senators on both sides of the aisle to chart a path forward.”
There’s that word “comprehensive” again….
“The tragedy in the gulf underscores the need to move quickly, and the president is committed to finding the votes for comprehensive energy legislation this year.”
Never Let a crisis go to waste, or a Lame Duck for that matter.
Under this scenario, the final product of any House-Senate conference could come up for a final vote in a lame-duck session after lawmakers have faced voters in November, thereby cushioning the vote’s political impact. (WP)

It’s been almost 30 years since anything remotely contentious was handled in a lame-duck session, but that doesn’t faze Democrats who have jammed through ObamaCare and are determined to bring the financial system under greater federal control.
Mike Allen of Politico.com reports one reason President Obama failed to mention climate change legislation during his recent, Oval Office speech on the Gulf oil spill was that he wants to pass a modest energy bill this summer, then add carbon taxes or regulations in a conference committee with the House, most likely during a lame-duck session. The result would be a climate bill vastly more ambitious, and costly for American consumers and taxpayers, than moderate “Blue Dogs” in the House would support on the campaign trail. “We have a lot of wiggle room in conference,” a House Democratic aide told the trade publication Environment & Energy Daily last month.
Many Democrats insist there will be no dramatic lame-duck agenda. But a few months ago they also insisted the extraordinary maneuvers used to pass health care wouldn’t be used. Desperate times may be seen as calling for desperate measures, and this November the election results may well make Democrats desperate. (John Fund, WSJ)

DAMN THE TORPEDOES! FULL STEAM AHEAD!
And of course, it’s all George W Bush and The Republican’s Fault.
What we really need is to have Lame Duck declared a  Major Health Hazard, because it’s potentially very, very TOXIC and  potential lethal to us all.

The Constitution

Writing in Salon.com, Gabriel Winant (a very Leftist columnist) complains of conservatives’ “weird fetishism for the Constitution.” ‘Nuff said.
US Constitution, Article II, Section 1
Before he enter on the execution of his office, he shall take the following oath or affirmation: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
VP: I, (name), do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.
Well, so much for that…
Chinese proverb “May you live in interesting times.” (sometimes referred to as a curse).
“Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.” –Benjamin Franklin
The constitution includes language to imply an expectation for the government’s incapacity to indefinitely respect the inalienable rights of it people and establishes that the ultimate power for the government reside in the people and not a monarchy, president, or congress.   It should not surprise us that our politicians have done exactly what our founders expected them to; allow power to corrupt.  This, after all, is a human characteristic that has been fully recognized and suitably acknowledged for all of recorded human history.   It should surprise us that the very people whose rights have been infringed upon represent the specific group who has enabled these politicians, sworn to “preserve, protect and defend” the constitution, to iteratively abolish their rights.   Indeed, it is the less fortunate, struggling, and working man; attracted to the appeal of big government and frightened by the complexities of our every-changing society, that is most willing to sacrifice constitutional rights in exchange for hollow promises of greater  security.  Sadly, it is this group who would most benefit from the very constitutional rights they are convinced to sacrifice, with little in return.(Scott Mitchell)
The End justifies the Means.
The End is Absolute power.
And absolute power corrupts absolutely.
So it’s crunch time. 5 months to the election.
Gotta get it done now.
The candy store is being foreclosed on.
And We the People will be stuck with the bill.