Say Anything Blog

By Michelle Malkin

At the annual American Banking Association conference this weekend in Chicago, the SEIU army spearheaded an angry mob protest against major financial institutions who have taken federal bailout funds.

It was the usual left-wing Kabuki theater. If the protesters were sincerely mad about the government bailouts, they’d be yelling on Capitol Hill and in front of the White House. SEIU is simply taking over for its disgraced brethren at ACORN — with whom they have long collaborated on corporate shakedowns. Remember: SEIU and ACORN are flip sides of the same corrupted coin.

This isn’t about demanding an end to corporate welfare. It’s about getting a piece of the action through the “persuasion of power.”

[...]

Same old same old from the Dem terrorists.  Organizational chart and list of associated organizations at the link.

One of Obama’s promises about his takeover of our healthcare industry is that we can save money by eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse”.  If he knows where it is, why not just do that now?  Why do we need a takeover by the govt to do it?
The very existence of Medicare fraud(the part of the healthcare industry already run by the govt) makes one wonder why they can’t prevent it now.

‘60 Minutes’: Medicare Fraud Raises ‘Troubling Questions About Our Government’s Ability to Manage a Medical Bureaucracy’

By Noel Sheppard

“60 Minutes” did a fabulous exposé Sunday on Medicare fraud that should be required viewing for all people who support a government run healthcare program in this country.

The facts and figures presented by CBS’s Steve Kroft were disturbing as were the details concerning how shysters bilk the system for an estimated $60 billion a year.

As Kroft warned viewers in the segment’s teaser, “We caution you that this story may raise your blood pressure, along with some troubling questions about our government’s ability to manage a medical bureaucracy” (video embedded below the fold with partial transcript, h/t Marc

  [...]

  At the center of both issues is Medicare, the government insurance program that provides health care to 46 million elderly and disabled Americans. But it also provides a rich and steady income stream for criminals who are constantly finding new ways to steal a sizable chunk of the half a trillion dollars that are paid out each year in Medicare benefits.

  In fact, Medicare fraud - estimated now to total about $60 billion a year - has become one of, if not the most profitable crimes in America.

  We caution you that this story may raise your blood pressure, along with some troubling questions about our government’s ability to manage a medical bureaucracy.

[...]

Just imagine what the fraud will be like if the government is responsible for everyone’s healthcare.

As the segment drew to a close, Holder told Kroft something that should scare the heck out of everyone who wants government run insurance for all Americans: “I think people I don’t think necessarily thought that something as well intentioned as Medicare and Medicaid would necessarily attract fraudsters. But I think we have to understand that it certainly has.”

Yes we do.

[...]

—

Be afraid, be very afraid, of the Obama takeover of our healthcare industry.
We will pay more, and get less.  It’s guaranteed.

Find it here

While Obama attacks the private sector(which has to earn its profits by providing goods/services people want) by demanding control of salaries he doesn’t like, the First Lady apparently is living in monarchial style, at our expense.  We get nothing from her lavish lifestyle, btw, and have no voice in how much money is spent on her.

Thomas Lifson

[...]

Meanwhile, our friends at the Canadian Free Press have discovered that Michelle Obama’s personal staff now numbers 26, a record, and that doesn’t even account for the media claque like Blow, whose soothing assurances do so much to buoy Michelle’s spirits. Paul L. Williams writes:

  She is served by twenty-six attendants, including a hair dresser and make-up artist.

  The annual cost to taxpayers for such unprecedented attention is approximately $1,750,000 without taking into account the expense of the lavish benefit packages afforded to every attendant.

  Little did American voters realize the call for “change”  would result in the establishment of an Obama oligarchy.

  The discovery of the additional attendants was made by D’Angelo Gore of factcheck.org and by calls to Katie McCormick Lelyyeld, Michelle Obama’s press secretary.

That compares to 16 White House aides with “First lady” responsibilities in 2008.

It looks like we “inherited” a spendthrift pair of lefties when we elected these people.

By CALVIN WOODWARD

WASHINGTON (AP) - Quick quiz: What do these enterprises have in common? Farm and construction machinery, Tupperware, the railroads, Hershey sweets, Yum food brands and Yahoo? Answer: They’re all more profitable than the health insurance industry. In the health care debate, Democrats and their allies have gone after insurance companies as rapacious profiteers making “immoral” and “obscene” returns while “the bodies pile up.”

Ledgers tell a different reality. Health insurance profit margins typically run about 6 percent, give or take a point or two. That’s anemic compared with other forms of insurance and a broad array of industries, even some beleaguered ones.

Profits barely exceeded 2 percent of revenues in the latest annual measure. This partly explains why the credit ratings of some of the largest insurers were downgraded to negative from stable heading into this year, as investors were warned of a stagnant if not shrinking market for private plans.

Insurers are an expedient target for leaders who want a government-run plan in the marketplace. Such a public option would force private insurers to trim profits and restrain premiums to compete, the argument goes. This would “keep insurance companies honest,” says President Barack Obama.

The debate is loaded with intimations that insurers are less than straight, when they are not flatly accused of malfeasance.

[...]

THE NUMBERS:

Health insurers posted a 2.2 percent profit margin last year, placing them 35th on the Fortune 500 list of top industries. As is typical, other health sectors did much better - drugs and medical products and services were both in the top 10.

The railroads brought in a 12.6 percent profit margin. Leading the list: network and other communications equipment, at 20.4 percent.

HealthSpring, the best performer in the health insurance industry, posted 5.4 percent. That’s a less profitable margin than was achieved by the makers of Tupperware, Clorox bleach and Molson and Coors beers.

The star among the health insurance companies did, however, nose out Jack in the Box restaurants, which only achieved a 4 percent margin.

UnitedHealth Group, reporting third quarter results last week, saw fortunes improve. It managed a 5 percent profit margin on an 8 percent growth in revenue.

Van Hollen is right that premiums have more than doubled in a decade, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation study that found a 131 percent increase.

But were the Bush years golden ones for health insurers?

Not judging by profit margins, profit growth or returns to shareholders. The industry’s overall profits grew only 8.8 percent from 2003 to 2008, and its margins year to year, from 2005 forward, never cracked 8 percent.

The latest annual profit margins of a selection of products, services and industries: Tupperware Brands, 7.5 percent; Yahoo, 5.9 percent; Hershey, 6.1 percent; Clorox, 8.7 percent; Molson Coors Brewing, 8.1 percent; construction and farm machinery, 5 percent; Yum Brands (think KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell), 8.5 percent.

Once again, this administration’s untruthfulness is exposed to the light of truth.
If their healthcare plan is so good for us, why do they have to lie about it?

Thomas Lifson

When government gets the ability to spy on its citizens, abuses will take place. The UK well illustrates the problem. Sarah Lyall writes in the New York Times:

  ... under a law enacted in 2000 to regulate surveillance powers, it is legal for localities to follow residents secretly. Local governments regularly use these surveillance powers - which they “self-authorize,” without oversight from judges or law enforcement officers - to investigate malfeasance like illegally dumping industrial waste, loan-sharking and falsely claiming welfare benefits.

  But they also use them to investigate reports of noise pollution and people who do not clean up their dogs’ waste. Local governments use them to catch people who fail to recycle, people who put their trash out too early, people who sell fireworks without licenses, people whose dogs bark too loudly and people who illegally operate taxicabs.

[...]

We have no such law in the United States, of course, but we do have a system in which Joe the Plumber’s taxes and other records were illegally pulled up by political hacks working as government bureaucrats. And now, we are faced with a possible government takeover of health care, along with talk of computerized medical records for everyone (as a “cost saving” measure of course). If everyone’s records are in a database, you can forget about patient-physician confidentiality, no matter what “safeguards” are promised by the folks who can’t deliver swine flu vaccine when it is needed.

Big Brother Obama has plans for us, and he’s looking to Europe and the ME for programs to emulate.
Sharia law will be next, IMO.

Find it here

In a long a exhaustive article, the author gives examples of the Dem/media smear collaboration that has existed since the Fifties in this country, and how it is getting more desperate and vicious at this time.  Some excerpts:

The choice of “designed” is deliberate. Sarah Palin was the victim of the most vicious, global, and organized campaign ever carried out against a modern politician. It might have begun spontaneously, as the standard mud-flinging attendant to any political campaign. (Yeah, I know - liberals don’t actually do that, they sit around on chaise longues wearing togas discussing policy in Socratic dialogue. I’m just being a throwback.) But it soon expanded well beyond the customary level of heated campaign rhetoric to fill every last niche of the media sphere, a process that could not have occurred without manipulation at every last turn.

The anti-Palin campaign was intended to implant myths so complex, so convoluted, and so widespread that they could never be completely countered. The American left has developed the art of slander to a degree never previously achieved. It’s one thing they’re good at. Not even the most acid-tongued gossips of the Bourbon court at Versailles were quite the match of contemporary left-wing political operatives.

[...]

Vicious innuendo has been part of the left’s toolkit for generations. Long before Saul Alinsky formalized the practice, mud-throwing was a central element of left-wing strategy. Reading some of the attacks written by Marx and Lenin would make your hair stand on end. (Curiously, most of this stuff was aimed, not at the capitalist oppressor, but at lefty comrades, including Marx’s brethren in the Socialist International and Lenin’s direct competitors, the Mensheviks.)

[...]

The 1964 election marked the culmination of this fever. The GOP candidate was Barry Goldwater, a no-nonsense western conservative, viewed as stalwart, straightforward, and a little dull. Then Goldwater declared his candidacy and was immediately transformed into a fire-breathing right-wing lunatic. JFK had been murdered only months earlier, and no Republican had much of a chance, but the left pulled out all stops anyway. Ralph Ginzburg, a glossy porn merchant (and no relation to poet Allen, though I thought that myself for years), published a claim by “500 psychiatrists” that Goldwater was a paranoid schizophrenic. The charge was a complete fabrication—Ginzburg may as well have said 5,000 or 5 million—but it was repeated across the country all the same. After traveling to Germany to meet members of the center-right Christian Democrats, Goldwater, whose father was Jewish, was accused of meeting with Nazis. (A friend of mine, a stolid old-school suburban Republican, was painted as a Nazi by The New York Times for campaigning for Goldwater. An apology? Are you kidding?) About the only thing Goldwater wasn’t accused of was hunting wolves from the air.

The effort climaxed with a slander orchestrated by that moral paragon, Bill Moyers, who oversaw the creation of possibly the most infamous campaign commercial of all time, the “little girl” or “daisy” ad (the ad can be found here and is certainly worth checking out). A cute little girl is seen pulling the petals off a flower and chanting to herself. A gruff voice suddenly overrides hers, counting down from 10. As the voice reaches “1”, the scene—child, flowers and all—is obliterated by a nuclear blast. On the soundtrack, we hear the voice of Democratic candidate Lyndon B. Johnson misreciting a line of poetry from W.H. Auden: “We must love one another, or die.” (Actually, coming from LBJ, it sounded more like, “We mus’ luv one unadda, er dah.”)

Moyers’ ad was vicious, inaccurate, and very effective. As the culminating ad in a series (there were three or four others, each just as meretricious, none quite as powerful), it had the impact of a knockout punch. For days afterward, few politically-aware Americans spoke of anything else.

[...]

Liberal hate campaigns are a product of the ideologization of American politics. As liberalism has shifted more to the left, the concept of “the opposition” has altered. Classic American liberalism of the mature period of American politics in the late 19th to mid 20th century held a pragmatic view of competition. By the very nature of things, the opposition was someone you had to live with amid the give and take of the political game. While at one point you might be up, the next week it might be the guy across the aisle, so you treated him civilly as a matter of simple good sense. FDR selecting Wendell Willkie as ambassador without portfolio for Latin America after defeating him in the 1940 election is but one example.

Contemporary leftists, on the other hand, view their opponents as people you send off to the Gulag, unworthy of any respect, deserving of any kind of low blow, no matter how foul. So you accuse Goldwater of insanity, slander Justice Thomas as a sexual monster, casually publish plays, books, and films calling for the assassination of President Bush, and assault the first serious Republican female candidate at her weakest point—her family. And of course, you scream to high heaven if any form of turnabout occurs in your direction, as in the case of the Obama family, which was declared “off limits” early in the presidential campaign, at the same time that Palin’s family was being stretched on the media rack. (Someday, somebody has to do a study of liberalism and hypocrisy. It’ll be an awful lengthy volume.)

This style of political loathing has become effectively innate. It has been systemized to such a degree as to become integral. Modern liberalism cannot do without it. An entire structure has been erected on the basis of political hatred, and from that structure a whole new strategy has arisen.

[...]

Read the whole thing.  This is the real enemy of freedom, a concentrated and focused propaganda attack on real American values, in order to install a totalitarian regime of govt controlling every detail of our lives.

By Lachlan Markay

The cat is out of the bag at the New York Times. The Times has exposed, albeit passively, the true motivation behind the White House’s Fox News attacks. Contrary to the administration’s claims, it is deriding Fox not because it doesn’t report the news, but rather because it does.

It is news, after all, when an organization potentially receiving billions in federal funds aids and abets what it thinks is a criminal organization. It is news when a high-level White House adviser, responsible for the distribution of $80 billion in federal funds, is outed as a communist and a ‘truther’ conspiracy theorist. It is news when the president’s chief communications officer admits her admiration for a murderous dictator.

  ... officials at the White House had decided that if anything, it was time to take the relationship to an even more confrontational level. The spur: Executives at other news organizations, including The New York Times, had publicly said that their newsrooms had not been fast enough in following stories that Fox News, to the administration’s chagrin, had been heavily covering through the summer and early fall - namely, past statements and affiliations of the White House adviser Van Jones that ultimately led to his resignation and questions surrounding the community activist group Acorn…

  There followed, beginning in earnest more than two weeks ago, an intensified volley of White House comments describing Fox as “not a news network.”
[...]

  Mr. Clemente suggested that the fight was part of a larger White House strategy to marginalize critics. He cited a report in Politico about a strategy session in August at which officials discussed plans to move more aggressively against opponents…

  “This is a discussion that probably had to be had about their approach to things,” Mr. Axelrod said. “Our concern is other media not follow their lead.”

There you have it. The administration’s attacks are a means to prevent other news organizations from picking up on stories that originate at Fox. The White House knows that without Fox’s megaphone, controversies such as that surrounding former Green Jobs Czar Van Jones would have fizzled and died, and would not have created the public uproar that it did.

If these stories were not newsworthy, there would be no pressure on the mainstream media to cover them, and the New York Times certainly would not apologize for delaying its coverage.

The fact that Fox News actually reports news that is important to Americans, thereby forcing other outlets to report the story, is what concerns the White House. As Rich Lowry stated at The Corner, “their problem is not that Fox isn’t a real news organization, their problem is that it is.”

This is Chicago-style gangsterism, not good governance or journalism.
One commenter here made the false claim that Obama has practiced transparency because all this unfavorable news has been reported.  The problem is, it was reported by Fox News and conservative talk radio, and Obama is trying to silence and destroy them because they made his tactics transparent.
Without Fox News and conservative talk radio, we would have already experienced a fascist takeover of our country, IMO; we just wouldn’t know about it until Obamas Brown Shirts came knocking on our door.

Find it here

GMA Worries About Carbon Footprint of Food

By Carolyn Plocher
 
On Oct. 23 ABC’s “Good Morning America” aired back-to-back segments promoting climate change and, strangely enough, slamming hamburgers. First, George Stephanopoulos worried that Americans were becoming too complacent about global warming and discussed possible climate solutions with “Superfreakonomics” author Stephen Dubner. Dubner suggested choosing a kangaroo burger over a beef burger as a possible solution. Then Stephanopoulos interviewed Michael Pollan, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” and discussed the carbon footprint left behind by a McDonald’s quarter-pounder with cheese.

Pollan said that “you’re eating oil” when you’re eating a burger: “You need oil to make the fertilizer to grow the corn. You need petroleum to make the pesticides to grow the corn. You need oil to move it all around the country.”

Factoring in production, processing, and shipment, Pollan claimed that a quarter-pounder cheeseburger amounts to 26 ounces of oil. “What it tells you is that the carbon footprint of that burger is really big,” said Pollan. “The result is a product that takes a huge environmental toll and obviously takes a health toll as well.”

Interest in the carbon footprint of individual food products has been growing ever since the British government announced two years ago that it was developing a plan to stamp foods with carbon labels. Many other countries have considered it as well, including Thailand and France - even California has been lobbying for it. The latest venture into carbon labeling has been in Sweden, which revamped its dietary guidelines over the summer in order to give equal weight to climate and health. The New York Times covered the story in its Oct. 23 article titled “Sweden Looks to Diet to Cut Global Warming.”

If you thought it was difficult to figure out how many different colored vegetables to eat, now the Swedish need to remember to “favor carrots over cucumbers and tomatoes” because “unlike carrots, the latter two must be grown in heating greenhouses here, consuming energy.”

[...]

  The company states that the UK government recommends a target of 7.9 tonnes of annual consumption of CO2 in 2009, which means 21kg per person per day; drinking a smoothie means consuming 2,700g of CO2, or 8% of our daily allowance.

Got that?

[...]

But assuming that there are several labels and they are comparable, even then it’s probably worthless. As Phil Lempert pointed out during an interview with the online magazine FLYP, a food’s “footprint” constantly changes:

  The carbon footprint for a particular product, at a particular point in time, is different than it will be in twenty minutes, or a day, or a month later. So, if we look at the carbon footprint of imported strawberries in January versus in March, the number is going to be different ... Until we can have a bullet-proof standard that consumers can really rely upon, most of these logos and labels are really pretty meaningless.

[...]

It’s the perfect example of greenwashing, marketing products as “green” in order to boost consumption - and it’s being facilitated by the Swedish government and funded by its taxpayers.

With the media’s love for government regulation and the government’s love to regulate, it probably won’t be long before Americans are trying to work out the math in their own supermarkets. 

Taking into account that the entire spew about human caused effects on global climate is pure nonsense, this makes no sense, except to increase the control of govt over private choices, and to limit competition by putting everything under govt control.
They want to take away every bit of our individual independence, and are willing to tell any lie which will help them to do that.

Find it here

Real 2009 Budget Deficit: $1,785,603,936,384.06

David Hass

The recent publicly announced Federal Budget Deficit for 2009 is widely reported to be $1.4 trillion.

This figure is inaccurate. Why? Because the Government made an “accounting change”.

The real deficit is easily determined.

[...]

On Oct. 1, 2008, the National Debt was $10,124,225,067,127.69. On Sept. 30, 2009 the debt was $11,909,829,003,511.75. Subtract the two and voila! Do you get the $1.4 trillion dollar figure? Nope.

Our National Debt has increased not by “only” $1 trillion under President Obama, but has actually increased by over $1.3 trillion.

The media should report the actual figure, not the “adjusted” figure and report that the $1.4 trillion is an adjusted figure every time they use that number.

Of course, these figures don’t reflect the unfunded liabilities of over $100 trillion for Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. That’s a story for another happy day.

Why is Obama rigging the numbers?  Even the untrue number they admit to is a disaster.
This unprecedented transfer of wealth from the productive private sector to the Obama’s greedy govt is prolonging and deepening the Dem recession.

It’s the Dem promise to starve us of energy, dating back to mid-2008.  Find it here:

[...]

Starting in June (2008) and all the way through to Election Day, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and Harry Reid repeatedly told the country that they were ready, willing, and would soon be able to starve the country of the conventional sources of energy it needs to keep its economic engines running, regardless of the consequences, bowing before what may be the greatest hoax in human history. Enough high producers to make a difference believed them and abandoned their previous guarded optimism.

Starting in June and all the way through to Election Day, Pelosi, Obama, and Reid — but especially presidential nominee Obama — told the country that they were ready, willing, and would soon be able to punitively tax the 5% of the nation’s most productive so they could redistribute money to everyone else. Enough high producers to make a difference believed them and abandoned their previous guarded optimism.

In September, the decades-in-the-making, Democratic Party-driven housing and mortgage lending mess came to a head at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Washington then allowed itself to be blackmailed into a series of financial sector and other bailouts that appeared to be, and have turned out to be, seemingly endless. Enough high producers to make a difference headed for the lifeboats and abandoned what little optimism remained.

Enough high producers to make a difference abandoned their spring (2008) optimism, not because of then-current economic conditions, which were at worst mediocre. They did so because of their assessments of what economic conditions would be in the not-too-distant future, based on the perilous pronouncements of Pelosi, Obama, and Reid. Many of those who didn’t catch on during the summer did so after observing the reckless September-October actions of the Washington establishment.

As a result, they took steps that businesspeople, entrepreneurs, and investors ordinarily take when a serious recession takes hold — not hiring, not expanding, letting people go and not replacing them, making worn-out equipment last longer instead of buying new, and others — before the serious recession took hold. They deliberately downsized in response to stated promises by powerful government officials Pelosi, Obama, and Reid to penalize and punish them and the economy as a whole, if and when they gained power.

[...]

 

This is an excerpt from a much longer article which details the dishonest accounting of the Obama administration which understates his deficit by a significant amount.
Read the whole thing.

Rick Moran

Arguments go back and forth about whether or not the Obama administration is really “socialist” in the sense that they wish to control the means of production, takeover all businesses, and put the “people” (unions) in charge.

Wherever you come down on this issue, there is no denying the straight line from Obama’s Chicago roots and ways of getting things done to the White House. I wrote about it a while back when Chrysler dealers were being closed down, in a post I called “Not Socialism: Gangsterism:”

  It can happen because we are barking up the wrong tree when we accuse the Democrats of practicing socialism. Any Chicagoan recognizes what’s going on as pure gangsterism - the application of power through the use blackmail, threats, and pure muscle and the devil take the Constitution, the rule of law, and simple fairness.

  [...]

  It can happen because we are allowing it to happen. We are too busy, too worried about the economy, too frightened of the future, and too complacent about the idea that “It could never happen here.” It’s happening now and not enough of us are raising our voices in protest. Not enough of us are demanding that our politicians be held to account for meekly accepting Obama’s fait accomplis.

Since I wrote that, the Obama Mob has come down like a ton of bricks on numerous other targets, using tactics not seen since the Nixon administration - and some that Nixon would never have dared to try.

[...]

  In recent weeks the Windy City gang added a new name to their list of societal offenders: the Chamber of Commerce. For the cheek of disagreeing with Democrats on climate and financial regulation, it was reported the Oval Office will neuter the business lobby. Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett slammed the outfit as “old school,” and warned CEOs they’d be wise to seek better protection.

  [...]

  Next, every pharmaceutical, hospital and insurance executive in the nation was held out as a prime obstacle to health-care nirvana. And that was their reward for cooperating. When Humana warned customers about cuts to Medicare under “reform,” the White House didn’t bother to complain. They went straight for the gag order.

Ed Lasky adds a few more examples:

  Strassel was remiss is not quoting Obama himself who taunted opponents that “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” Great for a man who campaigned on doing away with violence among inner city youth.

   

  Let’s also not forget that he riled the mob against bank execs and then in a meeting with them to intimidate them he bragged that he was the only one standing between them and the pitchforks .

  How about another one? Well he threatened to send the IRS to audit officials from Arizona State University who refused to grant him an honorary degree, citing his lack of experience (though that was no bar for the European leftists who see one of their own and gave him a Nobel Peace Prize).

I think a big problem about countering this administration is that most of us are in a state of shock that an American president would use such tactics - and as Strassel says - use them so openly, so brazenly.

[...]

Sounds an awful lot like a Chicago gang to me.

It’s very difficult for most Americans to accept the fact that the President is a criminal; the backlash from much less egregious criminal activity by Nixon resulted in disaster for the Republican Party for a generation.
I think the Dems are looking at a lot worse with the guy they picked to lead them.

Find it here

It’s a tax, people!  Had Obama continued the energy policies of President Bush, we would be paying from $1.50-$2.00 a gallon for gas.
We’re all paying the price for his insane social spending which has seriously weakened our dollar, while his blocking of domestic energy development leaves us at the mercy of his terrorist buddies.

Apparently, Obama thinks that “volunteerism” requires a lot of taxpayer money to be spent.  When that kind of govt money is being passed out, just like in his Chicago hometown, there is corruption.

Michelle Malkin reports:

The entertainment industry, inspired by Obama’s $6 billion expansion of government volunteerism spending, is coordinating plot lines and ads to push public service. “The message will be nearly ubiquitous,” reports the Los Angeles Times, “starting in the morning with programs such as ‘Today’ and ‘The View,’ and then echoed on soap operas, prime-time series and late-night shows.” First Lady Michelle Obama, a relentless Americorps promoter who publicly extolled the Tinseltown initiative last month, will cap off the week with an appearance on the Jay Leno show on Friday.

But don’t expect Leno to ask Mrs. Obama about her reported meddling in personnel decisions at the scandal-plagued Americorps. Or about the program’s long history as a government boondoggle stuffed with make-work jobs, permanent bureaucracies, left-wing slush funds, and partisan lobbyists. More on that in a moment.

Once again, Obama shows his bizarro world idea that the people should sacrifice for the govt, rather than what our Constitution says, that the govt is subject to the will of the people.
No wonder he’s using ACORN to rig elections.

It’s all good!

It looks like the pro-legalization crowd has a very powerful ally; one that has the attention(and possibly obedience) of our President. Apparently, drug legalization has been on Soros' agenda for our country for some time.
In a very revealing article from Forbes, we find:

George Soros must be thrilled. Two hundred days into the Obama administration, and 16 years after Soros began his advocacy for drug legalization and promoting “medical marijuana,” the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) is venturing into the distribution and production of marijuana cigarettes. According to the Aug. 5 solicitation for proposals, the selected organizations will be controlled by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and will have to comply with FDA regulations.

Until the early 1990s, the voices to legalize drugs in the United States were not in sync. This changed with Soros’ first foray into U.S. domestic politics in 1992-1993. Soros declared: “The war on drugs is doing more harm to our society than drug abuse itself,” and proceeded with his checkbook advocacy through his Open Society Institute (OSI) to give some $15 million to establish and fund several pro-drug legalization organizations. Since then, he and his like-minded friends poured many millions into different programs aimed at drug-legalization.

[...]

Soros and the other proponents of medical marijuana and drug legalization claim that the price of government-provided “legal” drugs would significantly lower their current price, removing the necessity to commit crimes in order to secure the drugs.

But how much would governmental administration add to the cost? And what will happen when the “tax” is added on? When the government outsources the production and distribution, would pharmaceutical and new marijuana-cigarette producers be asked to give up their profits? How much would it cost to investigate the black market that will flourish supplying groups prohibited by law from receiving drugs—adolescents, airline pilots, police officers, etc.? This new industry could create jobs. But are there going to be enough sober workers to perform them?

[...]

Marijuana studies have been conducted over decades, and thousands of them document the adverse effects of this controlled (illegal?—its not controlled yet) substance.

Yet, now, for the first time, the government is soliciting organizations that can grow marijuana on a “large scale,” with the capability to “prepare marijuana cigarettes and related products ... distribute marijuana, marijuana cigarettes and cannabinoids, and other related products” not only for research, but also for “other government programs.”

Since when is the U.S. government in the business of distributing marijuana cigarettes? Is this part of the health care programs the Obama administration is so keen to enforce?

[...]

As for the harm caused by using marijuana, NIDA reports: “marijuana smoke contains 50% to 70% more carcinogenic hydrocarbons than does tobacco smoke ... which further increases the lungs’ exposure to carcinogenic smoke.” Moreover, “marijuana users have a 4.8-fold increase in the risk of heart attack in the first hour after smoking the drug ...This risk may be greater in aging populations or those with cardiac vulnerabilities.”

In addition, marijuana use causes “distorted perceptions, impaired coordination, difficulty in thinking and problem solving, and problems with learning and memory,” lasting weeks after the initial use. “As a result, someone who smokes marijuana every day may be functioning at a suboptimal intellectual level all of the time.”

If the government legitimizes marijuana use and develops a new marijuana cigarettes industry, Soros will no doubt boast that he had a part in this feat.

[...]

Notice that I’m not saying the pro-legalization crowd here at SAB is in cahoots with Soros; I think they’re largely ignorant of who is pushing their agenda, so they’re more like the “useful idiots” who sell Marxism without knowing what they’re doing.
Read the whole thing.