In the lead up to the vote on H.R. 3962, the “Affordable Health Care for America” Act (scare quotes intentional), Barack Obama offered this encouragement to legislators to vote for the bill: “This is their moment, this is our moment, to live up to the trust that the American people have placed in us,” Obama [...]

So it is done: 220-215. Two-hundred and twenty United States Representatives put their support behind 20 pounds and 2,000 pages of abusive legislation in the form of innumerable mandates enforced by 110 new government agencies. One of those mandates, though, cuts so violently to the core of our freedoms that it cannot go unanswered: Buy [...]

Democratic Congressman Earl Blumenauer is seeking to inflict yet another tax on the American people. This one, though, is far more insidious than the average tax thought up by Congress: The “Road User Fee Pilot Project” would be administered by the US Treasury Department. This agency in turn would issue millions in taxpayer-backed grants to [...]

In addition to my own take, there are two other takes on the speech I’d like to highlight as being dead on. The first is from Cato@Liberty, which offers us a look at Obama’s speech in plain English: Translation: I, Barack Obama, ignoring thousands of years of failed price-control schemes, will impose price controls on [...]

Tonight’s speech on health care was a doubling down on the part of the administration. All the bad policy, all the economic voodoo, and all the flat out repression remain in the President’s platform. So does all the newspeak: Since health care represents one-sixth of our economy, I believe it makes more sense to build [...]

Juan Carlos Hidalgo asks the question of the day in a post at Cato@Liberty: What Principle is Guiding Obama’s Honduras Policy? The Obama administration is threatening not to recognize the result of Honduras’ presidential election in late November unless Manuel Zelaya returns to the presidency beforehand. The presidential poll was already scheduled prior to Zelaya’s [...]

From former GAO head David Walker in the WSJ: Mr. Walker’s own speeches are vivid and clear. “We have four deficits: a budget deficit, a savings deficit, a value-of-the-dollar deficit and a leadership deficit,” he tells one group. “We are treating the symptoms of those deficits, but not the disease.” Remember, this is from someone [...]

If one looks at Barack Obama’s principles for health care, the basic ideas are right. His three principles are: Reduce Costs Guarantee Choice Ensure Quality Care for All Unfortunately, the health care measures the president is backing shows he clearly doesn’t understand the main problem with American health care. In America today, doctors rarely answer [...]

The news out of Sacramento appears good for the California middle class: The good news, Schwarzenegger glowed, is no new taxes. Digging a little deeper, of course, reveals the truth: REVENUES * Accelerate income tax withholding — $1.7 billion * Increase estimated tax payments for businesses and the self-employed — $610 million Between now and [...]

Instapundit links to a NYT Magazine propaganda piece about governing California, and the part about taxation reads as if it were written by Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, right down to euphemistically renaming taxes “revenue”: In the view of many, the origins of the mud slog began with the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, the [...]

Politicians are usually most revealing when speaking off-the-cuff, and so it was with Karen Bass: Q: How do you think conservative talk radio has affected the Legislature’s work? A: The Republicans were essentially threatened and terrorized against voting for revenue. Now [some] are facing recalls. They operate under a terrorist threat: “You vote for revenue [...]

Imagine a private school where students sat in a math class for weeks misbehaving and learning nothing. Imagine that school gets on TV news because the administrators suspended the young lady who blew the whistle by taking a cell phone video and giving it to her mom who confronted them. Do you think that school [...]

So, the FTC is coming after bloggers who make money and don’t adequately disclose it: New guidelines, expected to be approved late this summer with possible modifications, would clarify that the agency can go after bloggers – as well as the companies that compensate them – for any false claims or failure to disclose conflicts [...]

…forever.  But, if San Francisco’s most famous street vendor has anything to say about it, that boot will be well-shined: He sleeps under a bridge, washes in a public bathroom and was panhandling for booze money 11 months ago, but now Larry Moore is the best-dressed shoeshine man in the city. When he gets up [...]

Yesterday morning I was sent an article written by Michigan House Representative Paul Opsommer regarding the Department of Homeland Security’s push to implement Enhanced Drivers’ Licenses: The Department of Homeland Security is coming to Detroit to push their new “Enhanced Drivers License” (EDL) program on Tuesday as a way to make Michigan licenses compliant with [...]

Dear Representative Schakowsky – I’m a taxpayer.  The Tea Partiers are also taxpayers.  We are the people who make the enterprise of government possible. People in government would object to that statement.  They would say that the US Government has multiple revenue streams:  the income tax, other federal taxes, the Social Security Trust Fund, other [...]

In watching the MSM coverage of the Tea Party protests, the following arguments are used to try and debase the factual arguments of the protests: Obama plans to lower taxes on the majority of Americans while raising them on the rich. Obama’s budget cuts the deficit in half over the next 10 years. Right now [...]

News came out this week of a deeply troubling new bill from Sens. Jay Rockerfeller (D – WV) and Olympia Snowe (R – ME): The Cybersecurity Act of 2009 introduced in the Senate would allow the president to shut down private Internet networks. The legislation also calls for the government to have the authority to [...]

I’m watching Barack Obama’s press conference, and he urged people to remember “their commitments to each other” and our “common goals” as a nation. Collectivist economic actions, by not focusing on individuals and their best interest, actually increase economic inefficiency and destroy wealth. Instead of urging the people to change how they act and to [...]

Believe it or not, Jay Leno is not the biggest clown with that particular last name.  No, really, he’s not.  That dubious honor instead falls to my State Senator, Mark Leno.  Leno’s latest clown move is again introducing a single-payer health care measure that would impact all Californians: The new version of the bill, SB [...]