Incestuous Narcissism Part 3

indyfromaz|

The difference between a catfish and a lawyer. One is a bottom feeding, mudsucker and the other one is a fish.

What do you call 500 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?

A good start. 

There are a million of them, literally.

Like a swarm of Piranha, if they smell blood in the water boy will there be a feeding frenzy.

Is it any wonder that a large segment, possibly even a majority, of Congress is made up of lawyers.

Really.

No, Not really.

Ever tried to read the Health Care Bill?

I know I did, which is more than Congress, especially the Senate Chairman Max Baucus did.

At Over 2000 pages it would turn any mind to mush to try. Which is why Speaker Pelosi wanted you to pass it first and read it later.

You don’t need to know all the details. Trust us. We have your best interests at heart.

We are the Insufferably Morally and Intellectually Superior.

I just saw a segment on this website: http://facesoflawsuitabuse.org/

Fascinating stuff. You have all the makings of a good horror movie, except for the bikini clad teenage virgin. But give them time, I’m sure there’s a lawsuit involving that somehow.

I would also recommend my blog from Sept 3rd this year: http://indyfromaz.wordpress.com/2010/09/03/the-lawsuit-lottery/

Trial Lawyers and their lawsuits that have driven up the cost of everything, including Health Care, was specifically and deliberately (with extreme prejudice) left out of the Health Care Bill because they are a important component of the Democratic Party base. They are also Congressman to begin with as well.

Jon “Baby Man” Edwards was Trial Lawyer.

Three-quarters of all small business owners in America are concerned they might be the target of a frivolous or unfair lawsuit. Of those who are most concerned, six in ten say the fear of lawsuits makes them feel more constrained in making business decisions generally, and 54 percent say lawsuits or the threat of lawsuits forced them to make decisions they otherwise would not have made.

Small businesses paid $105.4 billion in tort liability costs in 2008.

Tort, fancy word for lawsuit, BTW.

Small businesses are responsible for 64 percent of all new jobs created in the U.S economy. (facesoflawsuitabuse.org)

But faced with massive lawsuits, a massive tax increase on 1/1/11 that Democrats are too cowardly to address, Health care Mandates and fines, financial regulation that choke off productivity, is it any wonder that job creation is in the tank?

Yes, the President did pass what he called a “Small Business” jobs bill, aka yet another Stimulus, but it will be ineffective and is there largely as a PR tool as he is now in 100% campaign mode and nothing else matters.

And banks aren’t really lending the money to begin with. So if you can’t get the loan how can you expand??

America’s civil justice system is the world’s most expensive, with a direct cost in 2008 of $254.7 billion, or 1.79 percent of the U.S. GDP.

The cost of the U.S. tort liability system as a percentage of GDP is more than double the average cost of any other industrialized nation.

Tort costs were $838 per U.S. citizen in 2008, meaning a family of four paid a “litigation tax” of $3,352 for the U.S. civil justice system, a cost driven up due to increased costs from lawsuits and other liability expenses that force businesses to raise the price of products and services. 

But Congress won’t do anything about it, especially not Democrats, as they as incestuously parasitic of each other and the Piranhas in Pinstripes in Congress wouldn’t want to reign in their brethren after all, they might be them again some day.

You wouldn’t wont want be nice to evil Corporate America that just rapes and pillages itself across the land unchecked now would you? 

One of my favorites from the website Face of Lawsuit Abuse (run by The US Chamber of Commerce that was barred and banned from Health Care debate because they dared to disagree with the Almighty Ones) was the landlord who was sued because a tenant claimed that the legally required notices of entry for repair and the like were harassment and caused emotional distress.

Vytas Juskys and his small business manage apartment buildings and are committed to constantly upgrading and making repairs to the homes of the tenants. He thought that improving their apartments and the common areas would help his residents love where they lived; he never expected that one of them would thank him with a lawsuit.

Juskys was in the process of improving an apartment complex he had just acquired when he learned he was being sued. He had been making a variety of repairs to the building and the surrounding facilities, and he was posting regular repair notices on the tenants’ doors, as is required by law.

But one tenant claimed that these notices caused her emotional distress, and she sued Juskys for $500,000. The irony, Juskys says, is that the plaintiff had personally been requesting improvements and then sued him for notifying her that he was planning to make them.

“There’s no way to avoid it,” Juskys says. “At some point, if you’re into real estate, you’re going to get sued. We’re easy prey.” The lawsuit not only took away from Juskys’ ability to focus on his tenants and the properties he manages, it also prevented him from initiating new projects, hiring extra employees and creating jobs.

On the day of the trial, Juskys’ insurance company decided to settle the case, and he was required to pay thousands of dollars out of his own pocket.

Juskys now understands why businesses settle even the most frivolous of lawsuits. Small businesses like his can’t win, he says. Even if he had gone to trial and the jury had ruled in his favor, his only winnings would have been a legal bill, higher insurance rates, and lost time.

“You try to do everything right,” Juskys says, “and it’s just not good enough.”

So his costs go up, your costs go up, the lawyers profits go up.

Why would Congress, full of lawyers, ever want to put a stop to such a thing? 

OR

KALISPELL – A Kalispell girl charged with two counts of deliberate homicide after police say she attempted suicide by driving her car into oncoming traffic has filed a lawsuit against the estate of the woman who died.

The lawsuit filed in Flathead County District Court names the estate of 35-year-old Erin Thompson of Columbia Falls as well as the construction company that built the U.S. 93 overpass at Church Drive where the collision took place near Kalispell on March 19, 2009. The girl is seeking unspecified damages.

The girl and her father filed the lawsuit on July 15 contending Thompson, four months pregnant, caused the crash. Her 13-year-old son, Caden Odell, also died.

Thompson’s husband, Jason Thompson, is listed in the lawsuit as the representative of the estate.

Also named in the lawsuit are Knife River Corp., Western Traffic Control Inc. and Mountain West Holding Co.

Police say the girl was traveling southbound when she crossed the centerline at a speed of 85 mph.

Investigators believe the girl was trying to commit suicide after arguing with her boyfriend earlier in the day. Shortly before the crash, authorities say, she sent him several text messages, including one that said, “Good bye … My last words …” and one that said, “If I won. I would have you. And I wouldn’t crash my car.”

IBD:  Medicare dictates the prices it pays clinicians, facilities, medical suppliers and private health plans through more than a dozen different price-control schemes. Efforts to reduce those prices typically fail because of what Tom Daschle calls the “patient-provider pincer movement”: Medicare enrollees and health care providers join forces to undo those cuts.

Each producer that depends on Medicare for its income faces an enormous incentive to lobby for higher prices. The prices for, say, hospital services could make or break a lot of hospitals. And if the hospitals don’t lobby to increase those prices, who will? Enrollees like the easy access to medical care that comes with higher Medicare spending.

So when the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 reduces the prices Medicare pays physicians (through the “sustainable growth rate” formula), or ObamaCare reduces the prices for hospital services, home health care and Medicare Advantage plans, we can predict — and experience has shown — that intense lobbying by enrollees and the affected producers will thwart these measures.

Now if that isn’t incestuous narcissism what is? Deliberately raising the prices to what you know will be unsustainable levels just because the alternative doesn’t doesn’t benefit you personally.

And if you object you’ll get the “grandma using a dead person’s teeth” story like you did during the Health Care debacle.

And as was mentioned numerous times in this blog the cuts that the Health Care law proposed were to Medicare Advantage, a program that was showing some promise.

And without those cuts, half of the projected “savings” for the Health Care monster evaporate.

So, given the track record of narcissism what do think will happen?

And if they do try and cut them don’t you expect there will be a veritable plague of locusts…I mean Lawyers…all over it and it will be litigated until you’re already dead. But the Lawyers will make millions of it.

In the end the Lawyers win.

And if that isn’t incest at it’s best, what is?

Lawyers are necessary to a point, but the over lawyering lawsuit lottery job killing psycho need for the quick buck frivolous drop of any hat lawsuit is not.

But don’t expect Congress, especially this one, or even a Republican one, to do much about it because that’s asking the wolf to stop playing with the chickens.

And the chickens are going to sue you for  emotional distress for not protecting them from the wolves. And hire a wolf to do it!

Isn’t that just peachy. :)

 

The Lawsuit Lottery

 

__________________

Overlawyered: Fearing lawsuits over injuries, a West Virginia county is removing swing sets from elementary schools. A minor, local issue? No. America’s litigious society has changed the way kids play.
Roughly a year after a child broke his arm jumping off a swing like Superman and his parents are settling a lawsuit for $20,000, Cabell County, W.V., schools are yanking swing sets from school playgrounds. The lawsuit was one of two filed in the last year against Cabell County schools over swing set injuries, the West Virginia Record reported Thursday. School safety manager Tim Stewart, who is overseeing the removal, said he sees “a high potential when it comes to swings and lawsuits.”
What’s happening in Cabell County is not an isolated case. Local governments, fearful of lawsuits, have been for years closing pools, stripping playgrounds of equipment and banning outdoor games.
A Massachusetts elementary school has told students they can’t play tag. One Boston school forbids handstands while another in Needham, Mass., doesn’t allow students to hang upside down from the monkey bars. A pool in Hazleton, Pa., closed some years ago after a swimmer sued for $100,000 because he cut his foot running and jumping into the pool, though he’d been warned not to.
“There is nothing left in playgrounds that would attract the interest of a child over the age of four,” Philip K. Howard, lawyer and author, wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 2008.
“Exercise in schools is carefully programmed, when it exists at all. … Broward County, Fla., banned running at recess. .. . Little Leagues forbid sliding into base. Some towns ban sledding. High diving boards are history, and it’s only a matter of time before all diving boards disappear.”
Olga Jarrett, a Georgia State University professor who prepares students to teach, told the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform: “Many schools don’t have playgrounds at all, they don’t have recess. They’ve been built without playgrounds with the idea that this is not something we do at school.”
She blames “a fear of lawsuits that makes some school systems and cities design playgrounds that are completely uninteresting to kids.”
Howard, who wrote “The Death Of Common Sense” and “Life Without Lawyers,” has been warning the country for years that our fear of litigation is changing American culture.
He has preached the importance of placing reasonable limits on lawsuits and restoring reliability and justice to our legal system.
While we’ve seen enough progress to be hopeful, we don’t expect civil law reform to move as fast as it should as long as so many of our policymakers are owned by the plaintiffs’ attorneys lobby.(IBD)

Then consider all the Lawyer adds on TV. You can’t have a commercial break without one…or two…or three…
Or the whacko who sued McDonalds because her hot coffee was too hot!
Or the fact that Tort Reform (aka Trial Lawyers) were explicitly ignored by ObamaCare. Why, Trial Lawyers are one of the Democrats main source of cash!!
You have 43 warnings on a Step ladder, like do not stand on top of this ladder!
Duh!

For example, does a Superman costume really need a warning label to tell people that it doesn’t cause super-strength or the ability to fly?
Really? No Kidding. Does that mean I sell my kryptonite on E-Bay then?
A teenage boy was hit by a runaway bat . His family sued the maker of the bat and got $850,000 in a products liability suit because the company failed to adequately warn about the dangers that the product can pose.
So now, baseball bats are required to post warning labels? What should the labels say?
“Caution: Getting hit in the head by this product might cause death.” (findlaw.com)

The family of Brandon Patch argued that aluminum baseball bats are dangerous because they cause the baseball to travel at a greater speed. They contended that their 18-year-old son did not have enough time to react to the ball being struck before it hit him in the head while he was pitching in an American Legion baseball game in Helena in 2003. (USA Today)

There was a mother who wants to sue Sea World because her precious 10 year old was at the performance where the whale drowned the trainer. That was Sea World’s fault! And she wants the cash!!
I see one more “Mesothelioma” ad I think I will chuck something at my TV!!
And the Congress is made up predominately of Lawyers. The President is a Lawyer.
See: http://overlawyered.com/

I want also shed some light on the state of California’s up-to-$4,000-a-violation bounty system for freelancers who identify ADA violations in Main Street businesses, and the case for at least requiring complainants to give business owners notice and an opportunity to fix an ADA violation before suing. (The disabled-rights lobby has managed to stifle that proposal in Congress for years.)
So it’s the adult version of I-Spy, only you get $4,000 for hunting them down and killing them. Sounds more lucative than my day job.
Become a Professional ADA Violation Spotter and become rich!
You own a business, maybe a restaurant. You’ve got a lot to worry about. You have to make sure the food is safe and tastes good, that the place is clean and appealing, that workers are friendly and paid according to a hundred Labor Department and IRS rules. (and soon ObamaCare, Cap & Trade,and Tax Increases!)

On top of that, there are rules you might have no idea about.
The bathroom sinks must be a specified height. So must the doorknobs and mirrors. You must have rails. And if these things aren’t right — say, if your mirror is just one inch too high — you could be sued for thousands of dollars.
And be careful. If you fail to let a customer bring a large snake, which he calls his “service animal,” into your restaurant, you could be in trouble.
The ADA was supposed to help more disabled people find jobs. But did it?
Strangely, no. An MIT study found that employment of disabled men ages 21 to 58 declined after the ADA went into effect. Same for women ages 21 to 39.
How could employment among the disabled have declined?
Because the law turns “protected” people into potential lawsuits. Most ADA litigation occurs when an employee is fired, so the safest way to avoid those costs is not to hire the disabled in the first place.
Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of the blog, Overlawyered.com, says that the law was unnecessary. Many “hire the handicapped” programs existed before the ADA passed. Sadly, now most have been quietly discontinued, probably because of the threat of legal consequences if an employee doesn’t work out.
Under the ADA, Olson notes, fairness does not mean treating disabled people the same as non-disabled people. Rather it means accommodating them. In other words, the law requires that people be treated unequally.
The law has also unleashed a landslide of lawsuits by “professional litigants” who file a hundred suits at a time. Disabled people visit businesses to look for violations, but instead of simply asking that a violation be corrected, they partner with lawyers who (legally) extort settlement money from the businesses.
Some disabled people have benefited from changes effected by the ADA, but the costs are rarely accounted for. If a small business has to lay off an employee to afford the added expense of accommodating the disabled, is that a good thing — especially if, say, customers in wheelchairs are rare? Extra-wide bathroom stalls that reduce the overall number of toilets are only some of the unaccounted-for costs of the ADA. And since ADA modification requirements are triggered by renovation, the law could actually discourage businesses from making needed renovations as a way of avoiding the expense.
A few disabled people speak up against the law. Greg Perry, author of “Disabling America: The Unintended Consequences of the Government’s Protection of the Handicapped,” says that because the disabled now represent an added expense to businesses, many resent them.
Finally, the ADA has led to some truly bizarre results. Exxon gave ship captain Joseph Hazelwood a job after he completed alcohol rehab.
Hazelwood then drank too much and let the Exxon Valdez run aground in Alaska. Exxon was sued for allowing it to happen. So Exxon prohibited employees who have had a drug or drinking problem from holding safety-sensitive jobs. The result? You guessed it — employees with a history of alcohol abuse sued under the ADA, demanding their “right” to those jobs. The federal government (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) supported the employees. Courts are still trying to sort it out.
More money for the parasites. (John Stossel)

Stossel: http://www.foxbusiness.com/on-air/stossel/
Lawyers do have their place, but how much of this is too much and how much of this is the cart before the horse (trough)??

Lawsuits Make Us Less Safe

By John Stossel

Imagine if an evil business routinely deprived us of products that would help us live longer with less pain and more comfort. We’d be outraged, and lawyers would line up to sue. Yet something similar happens today, thanks to lawsuit abuse. Makers of all kinds of products are afraid to sell them to us because one lawsuit could ruin them.
Personal-injury lawyers claim they make America safer, but that’s a myth. It’s easy to see who benefits from those big damage awards we read about. Less obvious — but just as real — are the things we’d all like to have but never will get because of this climate of fear. Here are a few examples.
Monsanto once developed a substitute for asbestos — a new fire-resistant form of insulation that might save thousands of lives. But Monsanto decided not to sell it for fear of liability. Richard F. Mahoney, the CEO at the time, said, “There may well have been a safe, effective asbestos replacement on the market, and now there isn’t.”

//

Why do we have to worry about shortages of flu vaccine? Because only a handful of companies still make it. And why is that? Because when you vaccinate millions of people, some get sick and sue. Between 1980 and 1986, personal-injury lawyers demanded billions of dollars from vaccine manufacturers. That scared many American drug companies out of the business.
In 1986, Congress stepped in. To help curb the lawsuits that discouraged vaccine production, the government established a fund called the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. It would pay victims’ families directly so they wouldn’t have to hire lawyers and suffer the delays of litigation. This was supposed to entice vaccine makers back into production, but drug companies were still leery, fearing that plaintiffs’ lawyers would sue them anyway.
They were right to worry. Eli Lilly developed a mercury-based preservative called Thimerosal that was used in many children’s vaccines. Plaintiffs’ lawyers jumped on scaremongers’ claims that mercury causes autism in children. Although a government-issued review found no such link, more than 100 autism lawsuits have been filed against vaccine makers since the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Compensation Act passed. No wonder most drug manufacturers still steer clear of vaccine research.
Even when new vaccines are discovered, drug companies are sometimes afraid to sell them. The FDA has approved a vaccine against Lyme disease. Want some? Forget about it. No company wants to take the risk.
Fear of being sued reduced the number of American companies researching contraceptives from 13 to two.
After scientifically groundless lawsuits against breast-implant makers bankrupted Dow Corning, Japanese silicone makers stopped producing a pain-reducing silicone coating for hypodermic needles. A company director said, “We’re sure our product is safe, but we don’t want to risk a lawsuit.”
Union Carbide has invented a small portable kidney dialysis machine. It would make life much easier for people with kidney disease, but Union Carbide won’t sell it. With legal sharks circling, the risk of expensive lawsuits outweighs the possible profit.
Are you pregnant and nauseous? Bendectin would probably cure your morning sickness. For 27 years doctors prescribed the drug to 33 million women because it was so good at stopping nausea and vomiting. But you can’t buy Bendectin today because lawyers kept suing the manufacturer, Merrell Dow, claiming the drug caused birth defects.
Studies did not show that Bendectin caused birth defects, and Merrell Dow won most of the lawsuits. But after spending $100 million in legal fees and awards, the company gave up selling the drug. Bendectin has never been effectively replaced, and morning sickness is now a major contributor to dehydration during pregnancy.
Dr. Paul Offit, professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, says, “Within two years of discontinuing Bendectin, the incidence of hospitalization for dehydration during early pregnancy doubled; the incidence of birth defects was unchanged.”
Those are just some of the life-enhancing products we know we must do without because America’s peculiar legal system makes it profitable for trial lawyers to pursue extortion — like litigation. What wonderful products will we never even hear about because the lawyers have created a climate of fear?
You can’t even look cross-eyed at a kid if you’re a teacher and you can never ever be alone with one under any circumstance whatsoever.
Why?
Because if you are, you could be on the sex-offender registry and working at McDonald’s being sued for your coffee being to hot in a nanosecond.
Thanks to Lawyers and the Lawsuit Lottery.
This lottery is similar to the regular one, you gamble that your ticket (the lawsuit) will pay you mega-millions and set you up for life. And the nice Lawyer who gets as much as 40% of it is right there to cheer you on. For there own benefit, of course.
Everyone wins, Everybody else loses.
http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/29/safety-caution-product-liability-entrepreneurs-law-warning-labels_slide.html
http://www.amazon.com/Remove-Child-Before-Folding-Stupidest/dp/0446696560
The author of the above book: “Predatory lawyers know they can file ridiculous lawsuits against innocent product makers and blackmail them into cash settlements — even in cases in which a user has ignored common sense,” said Dorigo Jones. “The real issue is not the obvious warning labels, but the billions of dollars in litigation costs passed on to consumers — a kind of a “lawsuit tax” we all pay. That is why M-LAW (http://www.mlaw.org/index.html) urges judges and policy makers to support civil justice reform.”

But don’t you feel better. You’ve taken responsibilities for the risks of being alive secure in the knowledge that if you do something stupid there’s always a lawyer there to make you the potential millionaire “victim”. Meanwhile, actual cases that are very legitimate could be overlooked because there isn’t enough will or money for anyone to care.

AP/Michigan Lawsuit Abuse Watch

Sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite!
And if they do, I’m sure we can find someone to sue!

Transparent Steal

No that title was not meant to say “steel”.
I have maintained all along that Obama is very transparent, in his radical socialist ways and the Ministry of Truth is very transparent. If you’re willing to look at it from the jaundiced eye of a cynic.
But the illusion of transparency at least is no more. But it will be transparent that the media won’t talk about it. So I will, along with sources.

President Obama has abolished the position in his White House dedicated to transparency and shunted those duties into the portfolio of a partisan ex-lobbyist who is openly antagonistic to the notion of disclosure by government and politicians.
Obama transferred “ethics czar” Norm Eisen to the Czech Republic to serve as U.S. ambassador. Some of Eisen’s duties will be handed to Domestic Policy Council member Steven Croley, but most of them, it appears, will shift over to the already-full docket of White House Counsel Bob Bauer ( his previous job as the president’s personal lawyer, as well as counsel to the Democratic National Committee).

With Mr. Eisen headed to Europe as an ambassador, his move from the White House “is the biggest lobbying success we’ve had all year,” Tony Podesta, one of the most influential lobbyists in Washington, said with a laugh.(NYT)

Bauer is renowned as a “lawyer’s lawyer” and a legal expert. His resume, however, reads more “partisan advocate” than “good-government crusader.” Bauer came to the White House from the law firm Perkins Coie, where he represented John Kerry in 2004 and Obama during his campaign.
Bauer has served as the top lawyer for the Democratic National Committee, which is the most prolific fundraising entity in the country. Then-Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., the caricature of a cutthroat Chicago political fixer, hired Bauer to represent the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. In the White House, Bauer is tight with Emanuel, having defended Emanuel’s offer of a job to Rep. Joe Sestak, D-Pa., whom Emanuel wanted out of the Senate race.
Another Bauer client was New Jersey Sen. Robert “Torch” Torricelli back in 2001. When one Torricelli donor admitted he had reimbursed employees for their contributions to the Torch — thus circumventing contribution limits — Bauer explained, “All candidates ask their supporters to help raise money from friends, family members and professional associates.”
Bauer’s own words — gathered by the diligent folks at the Sunlight Foundation — show disdain for openness and far greater belief in the good intentions of those in power than of those trying to check the powerful. In December 2006, when the Federal Election Commission proposed more precise disclosure requirements for parties, Bauer took aim at the practice of muckraking enabled by such disclosure.
On his blog, Bauer derided the notion “that politicians and parties are pictured as forever trying to get away with something,” saying this was an idea for which “there is a market, its product cheaply manufactured and cheaply sold.” In other words — we keep too close an eye on our leaders.
In August 2006 Bauer blogged, “disclosure is a mostly unquestioned virtue deserving to be questioned.” This is the man the White House has put in charge of making this the most open White House ever.
Most telling might have been Bauer’s statements about proposed regulations of 527 organizations: “If it’s not done with 527 activity as we have seen, it will be done in other ways,” he told the Senate rules committee.
“There are other directions, to be sure, that people are actively considering as we speak. Without tipping my hand or those of others who are professionally creative, the money will find an outlet.”
This perfectly captures the Obama White House’s attitude toward disclosure. Sure, the administration publish the names of all White House visitors, but, as the New York Times reported a few weeks back, White House folks just meet their lobbyists at Caribou Coffee across the street. Sure, they restrict the work of ex-lobbyists in the administration, but lobbyists who de-list aren’t questioned.
And we’ve seen just a few of the e-mails former Google lobbyist, now Obama tech policy guru, Andrew McLaughlin traded with current Google lobbyists using his Gmail account, but who knows what else the White House whiz kids are doing to avoid the Presidential Records Act — Facebook messages? Twitter direct messages?
Did I mention Bauer was a lobbyist? At Perkins Coie, Bauer lobbied on behalf of America Votes Inc., a Democratic 527 funded by the likes of the AFL-CIO and ACORN.
As with his other reformer rhetoric, Obama’s transparency is mostly smoke and mirrors. (Washington Examiner)

I would argue he is very transparent in his disdain for anyone who isn’t the Harvard elitist liberal socialist that and his apparatchiks are. He’s so open about it that it’s nearly invisible.
And he gets all the help he needs from his socialist friends in the media.

When the open-government activist group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sued the Bush administration to get the records of White House visitors from Secret Service logs, media outlets practically fell over themselves to join the effort.  Newspapers like the Washington Post and USA Today and wire services like AP and Reuters filed amicus briefs with the court, and the Obama administration eventually agreed to start releasing the records.  Now, however, the same news organizations have discovered a new sense of privacy when it comes to their attendance in an off-the-record event with Barack Obama:
White House reporters are keeping quiet about an off-the-record lunch today with President Obama — even those at news organizations who’ve advocated in the past for the White House to release the names of visitors.
And guess who filed briefs supporting that argument? Virtually every newspaper that covers the White House.

Through July 20, Ms. Kumar counted 36 press conferences since Mr. Obama took office. That compares with the same number for the second President Bush, 66 for President Clinton and 54 for the elder President Bush the same amount of time into their presidencies.

But that leaves out some context.  Obama was holding press conferences every week or two in his first months in office, which is why he got to 35 by the end of July 2009, when it became clear that Obama was a gaffe machine when off of the Teleprompter.  Since then, he’s held a grand total of one, and it doesn’t look like the White House has any more planned after the late May Gulf spill presser.
When media outlets participate in off-the-record events, they give Obama a chance to spin coverage without doing so on the record.  It wouldn’t be a problem if Obama made himself regularly available in an open Q&A setting to the press corps, which complained when Obama’s predecessor would go a couple of months between pressers.  With the White House butting up Obama and keeping him off the record, participation in the luncheon is really just enabling the silence.  If media outlets felt so strongly about transparency as to demand the White House visitor logs, the least they can do is to acknowledge their own roles in letting this President off the hook for accountability and transparency. (hot air.com)

Just reinforces the fact that he is not a public servant, he is a public parent. This is the mommy-state way of saying, “Do as I say, not as I do.” (comment on hot air.com).

Well, they are the Insufferably Superior Left,after all. And remember if you agree with them you are intelligent, tolerant and well mannered.
If you disagree with them you are barking mad loonie who foams at the mouth and has the IQ of a dead light bulb. You’re “stupid”, “racist”,”ignorant” a “moron”, etc. ad nauseum.
So why should anyone take a raving loonie seriously?


In fact, according to a March 2010 Associated Press analysis of FOIA responses at 17 major agencies, 466,872 FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) denials were issued during the Obama administration’s first year in office – a 50 percent increase over the previous year.
In addition to denying more FOIA requests, Obama has refused to call for an audit of the secret Federal Reserve Bank and rescinded Bush-era disclosure requirements for labor union leaders – the same union bosses who provided over $100 million (and nearly half a million volunteers) for Obama and Democratic Congressional candidates in 2008.
The hypocrisy on transparency doesn’t end there, though.
As part of the draconian new financial regulations Obama and his Congressional allies are imposing on the private sector, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is now virtually exempt from FOIA law.† Under a little-known provision of the new law, the SEC would not have to release any information derived from “surveillance, risk assessments, or other regulatory and oversight activities” – a purposefully broad definition that encompasses virtually everything the SEC does.
You know the SEC, the ones who were too busy wanting porn 24/7 to watch either Wall Street or Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to care. And now, by law they don’t have to care. More Porn for the SEC, please….
“It allows the SEC to block the public’s access to virtually all SEC records,” former agency attorney turned whistleblower Gary Aguirre told FOX News. “It permits the SEC to promulgate its own rules and regulations regarding the disclosure of records without getting the approval of the Office of Management and Budget, which typically applies to all federal agencies.”
In fact, within days of the new law being signed, the SEC was already turning down FOIA requests from media outlets citing the new exemption.
But don’t worry, Big Brother will not lie to you…


The Ministry of Truth is involved with news media, entertainment, the fine arts and educational books. Its purpose is to rewrite history and change the facts to fit Party doctrine for propaganda effect. For example, if Big Brother makes a prediction that turns out to be wrong, the employees of the Ministry of Truth go back and rewrite the prediction so that any prediction Big Brother previously made is accurate. This is the “how” of the Ministry of Truth’s existence. Within the novel Orwell elaborates that the deeper reason for its existence is to maintain the illusion that the Party is absolute. It cannot ever seem to change its mind (if, for instance, they perform one of their constant changes regarding enemies during war) or make a mistake (firing an official or making a grossly misjudged supply prediction), for that would imply weakness and to maintain power the Party must seem eternally right and strong. (1984)
It’s transparent in it’s complete lack of transparency or even it’s appearance therein.


doublethink is the act of simultaneously accepting as correct two mutually contradictory beliefs.
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself — that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink..    ”
“     The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them….To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.
I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its development by any direct tinkering with words or constructions.–George Orwell
The basic idea behind Newspeak is to remove all shades of meaning from language, leaving simple dichotomies (pleasure and pain, happiness and sadness, goodthink and crimethink) which reinforce the total dominance of the State.
How could you have a slogan like “freedom is slavery” when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness. ⁽¹⁹⁸⁴⁾
The phrase “two plus two equals five” (“2 + 2 = 5“) is a slogan used in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four as an example of an obviously false dogma one must believe, similar to other obviously false slogans by the Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is contrasted with the phrase “two plus two makes four”, the obvious – but politically inexpedient – truth. Orwell’s protagonist, Winston Smith, uses the phrase to wonder if the State might declare “two plus two equals five” as a fact; he ponders whether, if everybody believes in it, does that make it true? Smith writes, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”

Now that’s transparent and on MSNBC,CBS,NBC,ABC,CNN,Their websites, The Huffington Post, The New York Times, et al. that 2+2=5. Now you just have to believe it.
It’s so transparent it’s nearly invisible.

The Political Class

The frustration that voters are expressing in 2010 goes much deeper than specific policies. At a more fundamental level, voters just don’t believe politicians are interested in the opinions of ordinary Americans.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 68% believe the nation’s Political Class doesn’t “care what most Americans think.” Only 15% believe the Political Class is interested in the views of those they are supposed to serve. Another 17% are not sure.
Skepticism about the Political Class interest in voters is found across just about all demographic and partisan groups. However, self-identified liberals are evenly divided on the question.  Eighty-eight percent (88%) of conservatives and 64% of moderates reject the notion that the Political Class cares.
Adults over 40 are more skeptical than younger adults about the Political Class. But even among voters under 30, nearly half (47%) don’t think the Political Class cares what most Americans think. Only 18% of these younger voters think the Political Class does care, while 35% are not sure.(Rasmussen)

America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution

By Angelo M. Codevilla from the July 2010 – August 2010 issue American Spectator
(Excerpts)

As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors’ “toxic assets” was the only alternative to the U.S. economy’s “systemic collapse.” In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not most, people around them also agreed upon the eventual commitment of some 10 trillion nonexistent dollars in ways unprecedented in America. They explained neither the difference between the assets’ nominal and real values, nor precisely why letting the market find the latter would collapse America. The public objected immediately, by margins of three or four to one.
When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term “political class” came into use. Then, after those in power changed their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and major industries but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing them to be beyond the general public’s understanding, the American people started referring to those in and around government as the “ruling class.” And in fact Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class.
Although after the election of 2008 most Republican office holders argued against the Troubled Asset Relief Program, against the subsequent bailouts of the auto industry, against the several “stimulus” bills and further summary expansions of government power to benefit clients of government at the expense of ordinary citizens, the American people had every reason to believe that many Republican politicians were doing so simply by the logic of partisan opposition. After all, Republicans had been happy enough to approve of similar things under Republican administrations. Differences between Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas are of degree, not kind. Moreover, 2009-10 establishment Republicans sought only to modify the government’s agenda while showing eagerness to join the Democrats in new grand schemes, if only they were allowed to. Sen. Orrin Hatch continued dreaming of being Ted Kennedy, while Lindsey Graham set aside what is true or false about “global warming” for the sake of getting on the right side of history. No prominent Republican challenged the ruling class’s continued claim of superior insight, nor its denigration of the American people as irritable children who must learn their place. The Republican Party did not disparage the ruling class, because most of its officials are or would like to be part of it.
Never has there been so little diversity within America’s upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America’s upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and “bureaucrat” was a dirty word for all. So was “social engineering.” Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday’s upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.
Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters — speaking the “in” language — serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.
The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century’s Northerners and Southerners — nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, “prayed to the same God.” By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God “who created and doth sustain us,” our ruling class prays to itself as “saviors of the planet” and improvers of humanity. Our classes’ clash is over “whose country” America is, over what way of life will prevail, over who is to defer to whom about what. The gravity of such divisions points us, as it did Lincoln, to Mark’s Gospel: “if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.”

The ruling class had sunk deep roots in America over decades before 2008. Machiavelli compares serious political diseases to the Aetolian fevers — easy to treat early on while they are difficult to discern, but virtually untreatable by the time they become obvious.
Its attitude is key to understanding our bipartisan ruling class. Its first tenet is that “we” are the best and brightest while the rest of Americans are retrograde, racist, and dysfunctional unless properly constrained.

When Woodrow Wilson in 1914 was asked “can’t you let anything alone?” he answered with, “I let everything alone that you can show me is not itself moving in the wrong direction, but I am not going to let those things alone that I see are going down-hill.”

Sound Familiar? It’s for your own good.  “I”  know better…

March 17,2010: President Barack Obama said he’s confident his health-care plan will pass Congress because it’s “the right thing to do” for the country and that he isn’t concerned about criticism of Democratic legislative tactics.

And anytime this President says he is putting aside politics (for any reason) I want to reach for the barf bag.
As the saying goes, they came to Washington to do good, and stayed to do well.
Confident “knowledge” that “some of us, the ones who matter,” have grasped truths that the common herd cannot, truths that direct us, truths the grasping of which entitles us to discount what the ruled say and to presume what they mean, made our Progressives (the worst form of Liberal Democrats) into a class long before they took power.
Our ruling class’s agenda is power for itself. While it stakes its claim through intellectual-moral pretense, it holds power by one of the oldest and most prosaic of means: patronage and promises thereof. Like left-wing parties always and everywhere, it is a “machine,” that is, based on providing tangible rewards to its members. Such parties often provide rank-and-file activists with modest livelihoods and enhance mightily the upper levels’ wealth. Because this is so, whatever else such parties might accomplish, they must feed the machine by transferring money or jobs or privileges — civic as well as economic — to the party’s clients, directly or indirectly.

Which is why before this blog on chat rooms during the 2006 Congressional and 2008 Presidential campaigns and the Democrats only real thought was to harp on Republican “corruption” I said repeatedly, they just want to replace the republican corruption with their corruption.
Switch out the cronies.
And that’s what we have. You have to be a minority and/or a union worker to get anything from this administration besides the back of their hand.
If you’re rich and successful, you are a demon, unless the government “deems” you useful or wants to take over your business that is.
Like Fannie and Freddie who were excluded from Financial Reform.
The Trial Lawyers were excluded from Health Care Reform.
Both are cronies of the government and the Trial Lawyers are the biggest cronies of Liberals.
As I said last week in a blog, the Liberals love to sue you into submission.

Rasmussen: “The American people don’t want to be governed from the left, the right or the center. The American people want to govern themselves,” says Scott Rasmussen, president of Rasmussen Reports. “The American attachment to self-governance runs deep. It is one of our nation’s cherished core values and an important part of our cultural DNA.”

But self-governed people are bad for the government busy bodies and their cronies who want to run your life for you because you’re an idiot and can’t do it for yourself.
They just know deep down, you’re a moron and they have to take care of you.
So Let Them Eat Cake!
Oh, sorry, Cake is politically incorrect because it has so much sugar in it and that’s bad for you.
So let them Eat Cookies.
Nope, not that either, cookies are the spawn of the devil  and lead to bad health habits…
So Let them Eat Tofu!
Without any help it’s flavorless, bland, or not very appetizing.
PERFECT!