Evan Bayh hates left wing bloggers-CNN

""He hates the Senate,

• the left bloggers," a friend and longtime adviser to Bayh said. "They are
  

• getting
  
• their wish,
  
• pure Democrats in the minority."

While Bayh had been mulling retiring for a "good part of last year," he made his final decision not to seek re-election Friday..."

• from CNN, "Bayh won't seek Senate re-election," 2/16/10, via RedState.com

NJ Governor Chris Christie shines a light where Obama refuses to--corrupt union contracts

"Let’s tell our citizens the truth—today—right now—about what failing to do strong reforms costs them.

• One state retiree, 49 years old, paid, over the course of his entire career, a total of $124,000 towards his retirement pension and health benefits. What will we pay him?
  
• $3.3 million in pension payments over his life and nearly $500,000 for health care benefits — a total of
  
• $3.8m on a $120,000 investment. Is that fair?

A retired teacher paid $62,000 towards her pension and nothing, yes nothing, for full family medical, dental and vision coverage over her entire career.

• What will we pay her? $1.4 million in pension benefits and another $215,000 in health care benefit premiums over her lifetime. Is it “fair” for all of us and our children to have to pay for this excess?

The total unfunded pension and medical benefit costs are $90 billion. We would have to pay $7 billion per year to make them current. We don’t have that money—you know it and I know it. What has been done to our citizens by offering a pension system we cannot afford and

• health benefits that are 41% more expensive than the average fortune 500 company’s costs
  
• is the truly unfair part of this equation."...

"Remarks of Governor Chris Christie to the Special Session of the New Jersey Legislature Regarding the Budget for Fiscal Year 2010,

• February 11, 2010" via RedState.com *****

As others have said, it is difficult to describe how deeply embedded the democrat machine is in the state of New Jersey. I am from NJ and most of my family still lives there. Only a few months ago, I said I didn't think a republican candidate could win in the state unless armed police were at every polling station. I was wrong and still consider it a miracle. Of course, it was a great help that the republican party itself does not exist in the state of New Jersey. Thank heaven. ed.



Above sign from NJ Garden State Parkway Exit 98,
leading to my favorite beaches on the Jersey Shore.
Thanks again to NJ voters.

We are viewed as paid galley slaves by Obama's side

• Don't mess with the loophole that put George Soros in the White House....

"Nothing—not even George W. Bush—has sent liberaldom screaming into the streets more than the Supreme Court's recent 5-4 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The Court's ruling that corporations have a free-speech right to express opinions about politicians running for office really let the furies out.

• President Obama's in-their-face criticism of the Supreme Court over Citizens United at his State of the Union speech got pundits on every blogger barstool chattering about the propriety of this public smackdown.

That's nothing compared to how the Supremes smack each other inside their public decisions.

• Justice John Paul Stevens dismissed the majority's opinion, written by Anthony Kennedy, as lacking "a scintilla of evidence" for its argument and making "only a perfunctory attempt" to root its reasons in the First Amendment views of the Constitution's Framers....

Justice Stevens's view of corporations, reveals a lot about why Mr. Obama and liberalism's left wing went nuts. It isn't just corporate political advertising that's anathema.

• Corporations themselves are anathema.

In his State of the Union swipe, Mr. Obama said the Citizens United decision would "open the floodgates for special interests." The "special interests," of course, is Democode for corporate interests. This week we learned Mr. Obama will try to convey his pro-business sentiments Feb. 24 to the Business Roundtable. Don't buy it.

• Justice Stevens offered the historic and psychological basis for this foundational antipathy.
  

"Thomas Jefferson," he notes, "famously fretted that corporations would subvert the Republic." A citation quoted by the justice notes that "the word 'soulless' constantly recurs in debates over corporations"; and "corporations, it was feared, could concentrate the worst urges of whole groups of men."

But here's the public-philosophy belief that flows from this view: "The Framers thus took it as a given," in Justice Stevens's opinion, "that corporations could

• be comprehensively regulated (my emphasis) in the service of the public welfare."

In short, private corporations have not much, if anything, to do with the public good.

In his crack-back concurrence, Justice Scalia ridicules "the corporation-hating quotations the dissent has dredged up." He notes that most corporations back then had

• "state-granted monopoly privileges" (sort of like Fannie and Freddie today—columnist's footnote)
  

and that modern corporations without these state privileges "would probably have been favored by most of our enterprising Founders—excluding, perhaps, Thomas Jefferson and others favoring perpetuation of an agrarian society."

• He ends with a conservative belief: "To exclude or impede corporate speech is to muzzle the principal agents of the modern free economy."

America's Democrats and Republicans, crudely defined, are with this presidency and this Congress living today on

• opposite sides of a moon that they both call the United States.

In the universe inhabited by Justice Stevens and President Obama, corporations—the private sector—are a suspect abstraction, ever tending toward

• "the worst urges" which have to be "comprehensively regulated."
  

• The saints regulate the sinners.

If you think this way, what one does to the private sector, such as the proposed $90 billion bank tax, can never be wrong in any serious way, so long as the rationale offered is the "public good."

• Private-sector players are seen as barely more than paid galley slaves on the ship of state.
  

So it is with the health-care bill's mammoth, comprehensive regulation of American medicine and insurance.

• Mr. Obama seems genuinely perplexed that the opposition can't just, you know, sign onto it.
  
• What's their problem?

Evidently, the voters of Massachusetts have a problem with that and more.

In the past year, Mr. Obama and the Democratic Congress passed a $787 billion stimulus, seized banks and the auto industry, embarked on a $1 trillion reorganization of the private health-care system, and passed a fiscal 2010 budget that put spending as a percentage of GDP at 24.1%. These are very large claims for the public good.

This public-private tension is an ancient and never-ending debate in the U.S. But what we are seeing this year, in Massachusetts and elsewhere,

• is American voters arriving at a tipping point over the scale and role of government. Most Americans still go to work each day inside a private economy organized around tens of thousands of corporations.
  

Their basic view of the world and that found inside Justice Stevens's dissent and this White House are out of sync."
Daniel Henninger, Wall Street Journal, 2/11/10, "The Scalia vs Stevens Smackdown" via John Batchelor Show

Top Pharma lobbyist resigns, seen as disaster for Obama

"Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) President and CEO Billy Tauzin said late Thursday he was resigning
effective June 30 after five years as head of one of the most powerful lobby groups in Washington.

• The group, which represents Pfizer, Merck and other top drugmakers,

• has been one of the biggest backers of Democrats' legislation to expand access to health insurance, among other reforms.

"The bottom line is: this is not good for the (healthcare) bill," said lobbying expert James Thurber, head of the Center for Congressional and Presidential studies at American University. "PhRMA played a key role and without Billy Tauzin, who is trusted by both parties, there ... it doesn't help the cause for getting the reform through."

• PhRMA pledged to pay $80 billion over 10 years in price cuts and other concessions as part of a deal with the Obama administration and top Senate Democrats last June.

Despite the costs, the deal was seen as a small price for the $315 billion drug industry to pay in exchange for potentially 30 million more insured customers....

• Still, his departure casts further doubt on the future of Democratic legislation currently stalled in Congress. Despite the industry's backing, Democrats are struggling to find a path forward to pass a final measure after losing their supermajority in the Senate last month.

The resignation of big pharma's top lobbyist further clouds President Barack Obama's ability to make good on his promise to overhaul the nation's $2.5 trillion healthcare system as Democrats struggle to pass their health reform plan.

• Tauzin, who served 26 years in the U.S. House of Representatives first as a Democrat before switching to the Republican party, was the major force behind PhRMA's deal.

• His group reported spending $26,150,520 in 2009 for lobbying, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

"His members think he gave away the farm for nothing. So he was really tossed because of a falling out with the board over miscalculating how to negotiate," a source familiar with the situation said.

• Another industry source, however, said Tauzin's move was not linked to the stalled healthcare reform effort but rather a
  

• personality clash between the former Louisiana congressman and incoming PhRMA chairman, Pfizer CEO Jeffrey Kindler.

A call for additional comment from PhRMA was not immediately returned.

Kindler, a Democrat, is set to take over the lobby group next month from current PhRMA chairman and AstraZeneca CEO David Brennan. Both Kindler and Brennan praised Tauzin's work....

• Still, Republican strategist Scott Reed cited flaws with Tauzin's approach, saying he "got seduced by Obama world, and it turned out to be a strategic blunder for his industry."...

PhRMA is still likely to have a strong role in shaping health reform negotiations going forward despite the leadership switch given its substantial funding. Industry analysts have said the current Democratic bills could be either neutral or positive for the sector....

• reuters report, 2/12/10
  

EPA mandate based on faulty, untested data and must be revoked

• Entergy, a giant corporate plaintiff in the 2007 Supreme Court CO2 5-4 decision saw its stock shoot to an all time high after the court's decision.
  

Entergy's chairman is a traveling salesman for the carbon trading agenda, desperately using telltale

• 'bullet' and life and death imagery in his pitch-which if successful will make him even richer......
  

"That the Obama administration and the Environmental Protection Agency are on the wrong climate path is the understatement of the decade.

• Recent disclosures through ClimateGate, an EPA whistle-blower and a daily
• barrage of scientific data call into
  
• question
  

• every assumption of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

These disclosures make it clear that the EPA's rush to regulate every aspect of American commerce, energy and consumer choices is based on flawed and

• perhaps even fraudulent scientific data.

Even according to a number of IPCC scientists, if the entire planet adopted the Kyoto Protocol and additionally ceased all productive activity worldwide tomorrow, the global temperature might be reduced slightly less than 1 degree — in 20 to 50 years,

• a trivial "benefit" purchased at catastrophic cost.

EPA defenders in Congress say not to worry because the regulations that will flow from the EPA's December 2009 endangerment finding have yet to be enacted.

Here's the truth: According to the EPA's extensive documentation, the forthcoming regulations are

• already placing enormous burdens on companies, employers, consumers and energy ratepayers.
  

• And once the regulations take effect, it gets worse.

For example, the EPA estimates a 20% across-the-board increase in costs

• for attorneys,
  

• regulatory compliance professionals, engineers and the like
  

in order to comply with the new regulations.

• Guess who'll pay the tab? You and I.

Representing more than a dozen members of Congress and more than two dozen associations and companies that are dramatically affected by the new EPA endangerment finding, our firm filed a petition for review with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia this week.

• In December, we asked the EPA to reconsider its ill-considered finding. In the coming weeks, we are likely to engage in a number of other challenges to attempt to halt this train wreck.

The Obama administration's agenda, echoing the globalist mantra heard at the recent Copenhagen climate change conference, would force

• a command-and-control regime onto the struggling U.S. economy
  

• that has no parallel in our nation's history.

Every American would be affected at great cost. Farmers and agriculture, manufacturers, trucking-transportation companies, railroads, energy producers and suppliers, and energy-intensive industries like concrete and glass

• will face staggering mandates that may dwarf the potential costs of pending health care reform.

The trade-off promised by global warming acolytes is an avalanche of so-called "green jobs."

• A pledge made by President Jimmy Carter more than 30 years ago, millions of
  
• green jobs have never materialized,
  

• despite billion-dollar public expenditures ostensibly designed to encourage them.

Moreover, according to recent econometric studies of congressional cap-and-trade proposals, which are less stringent than the forthcoming EPA mandates,

• 4 million U.S. jobs would be lost to increased costs and lower productivity by 2030.

The cost of gasoline, electricity and natural gas would increase

• approximately 150%. ***
  

The nation's gross domestic product would be reduced by more than $630 billion. The impact would be

• particularly painful to the poor and lower-income families.

Our foundation and the group of petitioners we represent are opposed to the government attempt to take control of key aspects of life

• on the pretext of saving the planet.

The method by which the EPA arrived at its "finding" is procedurally suspect and is based on science that is anything but what Al Gore has described as "settled."

The unprecedented cost in lives, jobs, services, consumer choices and quality of life inflicted by the EPA's draconian measures staggers the imagination,

• provides no significant environmental benefit and is likely unconstitutional."

• Goessling is executive director and chief legal counsel for the Southeastern Legal Foundation, a public interest law firm and policy center now litigating against the Environmental Protection Agency.

• from Investors.com, "EPA Mandates rely on unsettled science," by Shannon L. Goessling, 2/10/10, via Tom Nelson

***47/1% of George Soros Investments are in Oil and Gas

Technology	2%
Financials	0.3%
Utilities	4.5%
Telecommunications	0.2%
Consumer Services	17.9%
Health Care	2%
Consumer Goods	4.4%
Industrials	3.4%
Basic Materials	16.4%
Oil & Gas	47.1%

80% of $2 billion in US taxpayer dollars handed to foreign firms for 'clean energy' jobs

• The "green jobs" lie:
  
• "Despite claims that stimulus funding would

(a) reduce energy dependence on other countries, and (b) create jobs domestically, taxpayer dollars to support the renewable energy industry

• have instead gone overseas. According to the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University,

more than 80 percent of the first $1 billion in grants to wind energy companies went to foreign firms:

Since then, the administration has stopped making announcements of new grants to wind, solar and geothermal companies,

• but has handed out another $1 billion, bringing
  
• the total given out to $2.1 billion and the total that went to companies based overseas to more than 79 percent.

In fact, the largest grant made under the program so far, a $178 million payment on Dec. 29, went to Babcock & Brown, a bankrupt Australian company that built a Texas wind farm using turbines made by a Japanese company.

In fact, a new deal announced the same day as this report would give Chinese officials $450 million in stimulus grants to export Chinese turbines to a wind farm in Texas. "Dozens of jobs" would be created in the U.S. For China? "Thousands."

This report undermines the very justification for spending billions of taxpayer dollars on what was billed as a surefire way to kickstart the "Green Revolution." So much for that."

• Washington Examiner commentary, J.P. Freire, "Stimulus creating green jobs abroad, does nothing for energy independence" 2/10/10 via Lucianne.com. On to the next lie.
  

Hillary Clinton: 'I am sick and tired of people who say...'

"In 2003, Hillary Clinton screeched "I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration somehow you're not patriotic. We should stand up and say we are..."...from You Tube

• And while we're at it, load up 1000 buses from United for Peace and Justice and International Answer to riot against Obama every weekend like they did during the Bush administration. via RedState.com

'Socialism is really cannibalism'-Carol Negro

"Apparently in our current political climate
"socialism"

• has become a word that does not convey
  

• the horror it actually represents.

• It has become common and thus meaningless

beyond the virtuous idea of "sharing" and "taking care of the poor"."

• (Obama, a millionaire, with his trademark elitism and hypocrisy fails to support his own Aunt Zeituni, an illegal alien living off Massachusetts taxpayers). ed.
• 

Carol Negro, continuing: "People, especially among the ignorant --

• particularly the college educated --

seem proud to call themselves "Socialists" today. And the supremely ignorant -- our politicians -- go a step further, and

• celebrate the word "Progressive" as though it had a glorious and honorable history.

I refuse to allow "Socialism" and "Progressivism" to be understood as benign, helpful, caring, sharing- as another way of saying "The Brotherhood of Man".

• Socialism and Progressivism are cannibalism.

When I work, I use up hours of my life... my limited, mortal, human, physical life. The money I am paid represents the life I expended to earn it. My pay-my wealth-is my labor.

• It is the expenditure of some of my body's short, precious life on earth.

So when someone takes my money, they steal my hours of labor. They consume not only the fruits of my labor, but my labor itself, that labor which is

• the very expenditure of my life.

When someone loots and consumes the money I have earned, they consume the part of my life devoted to producing what they have taken.

What is that but cannibalism?

• A selfishness so profound, so inhuman, so greedy, so barbaric that it encourages and celebrates-

• and seeks to legally require- the consuming of the life's blood of one human by another.

That is the vicious reality of Socialism.

Don't let the bastards call it anything else."

• by Carol Negro from American Thinker, "Socialism is really cannibalism," 4/18/09, via Lucianne.com. zeituni photo timesonlineuk
  

....always under the guise of tolerance and compassion. s