Say Anything Blog

Lee Cary

A story from the old Soviet Union helps us understand claims that a jobless recovery is underway.

Once upon a time four of the historic leaders of the old Soviet Union were on a train going across the Siberian wilderness: Lenin, Stalin, Kruschev and Brezhnev. (Suspend your understanding of time.)

Midway across the wilderness, the train reached the end of the tracks. Construction workers were huddled around fires trying to stay warm. They said track supplies were short.

Lenin said he’d take care of it.  He climbed down the steps of the plush private car the leaders were traveling in, had workers build a simple platform, mounted it, and started giving a rousing speech. He exhorted the crowd to revolutionary effort to advance the cause of the people. They all shouted and went back to work.

In a couple of hours the train moved down the track about a quarter mile. Then it stopped.

The leaders looked at each other. Stalin said he’d take care of it.

He climbed down from the private railcar and ordered that all the track foremen be shot and new ones appointed. 

Work resumed. The train started up again. Went another quarter mile and stopped.

This time Kruschev said it was his turn. He descended from the rail car and ordered that the track behind the train be pulled up and laid in front of the train. He pounded his shoe on Lenin’s platform for emphasis.

Later the train began to roll again. This time it went farther than before. But then it stopped again.

Brezhnev said he’s fix things. He scrambled down the ladder, gathered the new foremen around him, and said, “Comrades, divide your workers into two groups. Line one half along one side of the train, and the other along the opposite. Rock the train from side-to-side so that it feels like we’re moving.”

And they did. Inside the railcar Lenin, Stalin and Kruschev marveled at how Brezhnev had been able to get so much track laid in so little time, and at all the distance they were moving across the wilderness.

Outside, Joe Bidenchev, a new foreman, encouraged the workers saying, “Look, Comrades, at how many foremens’ jobs we’ve saved.”

[...]

I guess the Stalinist part for this administration is equivalent to taking 90% of the CEO salaries/bonuses.

Mr. President: On several occasions since your election, you have declared that “the cost of healthcare” is the cause of this recession, which you now declare has ended.

You used this statement about the cost of healthcare to sell us on your massive and expensive plan to fundamentally change our healthcare industry, claiming that it will “reduce costs”.

However, although healthcare remains the same as it was before, the recession is declared to be over.

How did that happen, if healthcare costs were the cause of the recession?

In light of this “recovery”, why should we change our healthcare industry the way you propose?  What’s the compelling reason to change things now?

Do you still stand by your earlier claim that the cost of healthcare is causing this recession?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Freudian slip, Geraldo?

More political propaganda instead of any economic progress.
Even perky Katie is starting to smell a rat.

Find it here

Politically convenient metrics, not real economic truth(graphs at link):

The Recoveryless Recovery

By Randall Hoven

The recession is over, supposedly. The preliminary estimate of the 3rd quarter’s Gross Domestic Product was announced Thursday, and it showed the economy growing at an annual rate of 3.5% from July through September, after four consecutive quarters of decline.

As the Associated Press reported, waiting for the official call from the National Bureau of Economic Research—specifically, its Business Cycle Dating Committee—is all but a formality. That’s funny; GDP growth was not used as the measure for timing the beginning of this recession. So why would it be used to time its end?

GDP last peaked in the 2nd quarter of 2008. Yet the NBER said the recession started in December 2007, six months earlier. In fact, the NBER declared the recession before we’d even had two consecutive quarters of negative growth, the standard rule-of-thumb for calling a recession.

Could it be political?  The NBER’s Business Cycle Dating Committee is the “official” caller of recessions.  It looks for peaks and troughs in economic indicators.  It explains its method as follows.

  First, we do not identify economic activity solely with real GDP, but use a range of indicators. Second, we place considerable emphasis on monthly indicators in arriving at a monthly chronology. Third, we consider the depth of the decline in economic activity…  Fourth, in examining the behavior of domestic production, we consider not only the conventional product-side GDP estimates, but also the conceptually equivalent income-side GDI estimates.

It might just be coincidence that of the seven members on the NBER’s Business Cycle Dating Committee, one is the husband of Christina Romer, the Chair of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors.  Mrs. Romer herself was a member of the NBER’s board, along with her husband, until just after Obama’s election.

Why would anyone want to date this recession as starting and ending early? The earlier the recession started, the more it could be blamed on President Bush, and the more it could be claimed to have caused the global recession, which started closer to the second quarter of 2008 when measured the old-fashioned way (two quarters of consecutive negative growth).  On the other hand, the earlier the recession is declared over, the more President Obama and the Democrats’ stimulus can be credited with ending it.

Below is a graph of what GDP has been doing recently (not including this 3rd quarter estimate).  You see that real GDP peaked in the 2nd quarter of 2008, not in the 4th quarter of 2007 when the NBER said this recession started.

This might not seem like a big deal, but two quarters is six months. While the US enjoyed that GDP growth in the spring of 2008 (2.8% annual rate), Europe was experiencing GDP declines. As the graph below shows, Europe’s GDP peak was one quarter prior to the US’s, and its recession was deeper.

Yet the common wisdom is that our recession spread to Europe, not vice-versa. So is the common wisdom right? Unfortunately, we compare apples and oranges when we use the NBER’s dates for US recession, but GDP for other countries.

[...]

Sure enough, payrolls did peak in December of 2007, exactly when the NBER said this recession started. But look at the recent data, which is the September number. There is no sign of even a leveling off, much less an increase in jobs. By this indicator, the “trough” was not reached in the 3rd quarter, and does not even look imminent. In fact, the months of July, August, and September show payroll declines of 304 thousand, 201 thousand, and 263 thousand.

By that measure, there was not even clear deceleration in the decline, much less a turnaround.  What’s more, the rates of job losses were greater in those months than in all of the first eight months of this “recession” as defined by the NBER.

[...]

Funny how the NBER’s recession calls always tend to blame President Bush for as much as possible, and his Democrat predecessor and successor for as little as possible.

[...]

Heck, if you look at real disposable personal income closely (graphed below), we did all right under Bush, but not under Obama! In December 2008 it reached an historical high, except for May and June when Bush’s stimulus (remember that?) came out. But the latest figure (August 2009) is down slightly from that historical high under Bush. Over all Bush’s eight years, it was up 21%. Don’t expect to see these factoids mentioned anywhere beyond this article.

What I read overall is that the economy is in no way healthy or even getting better.  It is sputtering along more or less sideways at best. We are losing jobs—over 200,000 per month—and few in the private sector are bothering to invest in growth.

I wouldn’t doubt that the recent GDP growth is due to government spending—which produces little or nothing but gets counted in GDP—and the very temporary Cash-for-Clunkers program. After all, the Congressional Budget Office expected federal government spending to rise from 21% to 27% of GDP in the last year. An increase of 6% of GDP in government spending, brought about by shoveling dollars out the door, might cause a blip up in GDP ledgers, but how real is it?  My guess: as real as cash-for-clunkers.

I repeat my call for the NBER to be more transparent in how it times recessions, or for the rest of us to ignore its calls. The NBER’s Business Cycle Dating Committee is seven gurus neither elected by the public nor appointed by anyone who was. It uses no set method to come up with answers. The result is that the timing of recessions is inconsistent between their beginnings and ends, inconsistent among different US recessions, and inconsistent with recessions in other countries. The NBER’s “method” is not transparent and lends itself to accusations of political bias.

If I can appoint myself to the American Thinker Recession Dating Committee of One, I claim our current recession started in June 2008, after Europe’s recession started. I also claim that the 2001 “recession” actually started in 2000, while Bill Clinton was President. Actually, there was no real 2001 recession since there were no two quarters of consecutive negative growth then, and the worst case year-to-year GDP growth (4Q2000 to 4Q2001) was positive.

Just for fun, look at all the graphs above and recall that through 2006, Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, and that Democrats have controlled them both since.

What we really have is a PC recovery, which is no recovery at all.

By DANIEL HENNINGER

People thought something small, agile and smart was coming to government, but so far it’s turning out to be just big-box politics.

If you’re an elected Democrat anywhere to the right of Barney Frank, and trying to defend a competitive seat next November, you’ve got to be starting to sweat.

You wake up in the morning and just like every other morning as far as the eye can see the only thing in the news is the president’s health-care reform. It’s starting to look like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are leading the Donner Party, the snowbound emigrants who bogged down in the Sierra Nevada winter in the 1840s and resorted to cannibalism to survive.

[...]

The betting is that with raw political muscle and procedural magic, the Congressional Democrats will pass something, call it reform and hand Barack Obama a “victory.” Maybe, but I think what we are seeing with this massive legislation is that the Democrats in Washington have a bigger problem: Their party is looking so yesterday.

In a world defined by nearly 100,000 iPhone apps, a world of seemingly limitless, self-defined choice, the Democrats are pushing the biggest, fattest, one-size-fits all legislation since 1965. And they brag this will complete the dream Franklin D. Roosevelt had in 1939.

The culture still believes the U.S. has a hipster for president. But the Obama health-care bill, and maybe this whole administration, is starting to look totally out of sync with the new zeitgeist, the spirit of the age.

Everything about the health-care exercise is looking very old hat, starting with the old guys working on it. Max Baucus, Patrick Leahy, Pete Stark—all were elected to Congress in the 1970s, and live on as the immortals in Washington’s Forever Land. But it’s more than the fact that Congress looks old. The health-care bill is big, complex, incomprehensible and coercive—all the things people hate nowadays.

It’s easy to make jokes about how insubstantial the millions of people seem to be who are constantly using technologies like Twitter. But these new digital and Web-based technologies, which have decentralized virtually everything, now occupy most of the average person’s waking hours at work or at home. Mass media is struggling to stay massive in a world whose people want to break up into many discrete markets.

The one lump that won’t change is government. Government in our time is looking out of it. It’d be one thing if government were almost cool in an old-fashioned way, but it’s not. When everyone else’s job gets measured by performance, its hallmark is malperformance—whether in Congress, California or New York.

We define the past 25 years in terms of entrepreneurs and visionaries in places like Silicon Valley who took a small idea and ran with it. Congress does the opposite. It take something already big . . . and make it bigger.

We’ve got Medicare for the elderly, with spending claims out to Mars, so let’s create Medicare for All! One of the least noticed parts of the health-care legislation is its intention to make Medicaid even bigger, when Medicaid’s cost is arguably the main thing destroying California.

There was a time when contributing to the common good meant joining something relatively small like the Peace Corps or Teach for America. Now it means being willing to just fall into line behind some huge piece of legislation.

[...]

If we were really living in the world of leading-edge politics that many people thought they were getting with Barack Obama, he would have proposed an iPhone for health care—a flexible system for which all sorts of users could create or choose health-care apps that suited their needs. Over time, with trial and error, a better system would emerge.

No chance of that. Our outdated political software can’t recognize trial and error. What ObamaCare is doing with health care—the “public option”—may be fine with the activist left, but I suspect it’s starting to strike many younger Americans as at odds with their lives, as not somewhere they want to go. Wait until EPA’s ghost busters start enforcing cap-and-trade.

People thought something small, agile and smart was coming to government, but so far it’s turning out to be just big-box politics.

[...]

Here’s another way that the Republicans can contrast themselves with the Dems: We can stand for individual choice, instead of the “big box”, “one size fits all” approach the Dems take to everything.
The free market produces diversity, not uniformity like the controlled market does.

By Eric Richter

A soldier trapped in a foxhole during a fierce battle faces a profound paradox.

His survival instinct screams at him to hide in the bottom of his hole, not to rise up and shoot or attack. Yet if he obeys this survival instinct instead of his orders and training, and if the rest of the soldiers in his unit do likewise, then the whole unit will be annihilated as the enemy destroys each undefended position one by one.

But if he and his comrades overcome their individual survival instincts and attack together, then there is a good chance most of them will survive by defeating the enemy before the enemy can destroy them.

]...]

But it seems like some GOP honchos think their job is to preserve warm bodies labeled “R” in particular district seats instead of winning the ideological war for the hearts and minds of a governing majority of Americans. So in the NY 23rd special election, the party supports a candidate like Dede Scozzafava, a woman who has little interest in attacking the enemy positions, while punishing the brave warrior Doug Hoffman.

The NRCC thinks that merely by occupying enough electoral foxholes they will win a governing majority. But failing to ideologically attack, while apparently providing momentary safety to the individual soldier, dooms the army at large.

Party hacks say that polls of moderates show that filling the foxholes with center-leftists like Scozzafava will help gain ground. But the GOP’s most successful president, Ronald Reagan, didn’t win his landslide—and the Cold War—by telling moderates he was just like them. He won by telling the moderates why his conservative positions were right and the Democrats’ and the Soviets’ positions were wrong. He didn’t follow the polls…he changed them.

A worthy party leadership would be training and encouraging the troops in the foxholes to attack together, not training them to hide in the local terrain. Some candidates on the edge might lose their seats. But many more would be protected by the covering movement of national momentum.

There has never been a better time to nationalize elections on conservative themes. The Democrat welfare state totters on the brink of collapse under unsustainable debt, spending, taxing, ineffectiveness, and failure. Increasingly, the party must rely on more bullying coercion to force compliance with the unworkable (e.g., “the IRS must force you to pay more for healthcare to save you money on healthcare”).  Now Democrats are marching even farther onto vulnerable ground with Obamanomics and Obamacare.

The American Left today seems as invincible—but as internally rotten and rife with contradictions—as was communism when Reagan correctly labeled it a “sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages even now are being written.” But liberty’s defeat of communism didn’t manage itself; it required Reagan’s leadership. Similarly, the defeat of Democrat socialism requires our leadership. Recruiting weak heads-down soldiers like Scozzafava, and punishing brave soldiers like Doug Hoffman, is not leadership; it is self-destructive surrender.

Instead of stabbing other Republicans in the back over single-issue hysteria, we should concentrate on the big picture of returning our country to Constitutional govt.

By Michelle Malkin

Two weeks ago, I pointed you to the festering corruption scandal involving President Obama’s US Attorney nominee in Colorado, Stephanie Villafuerte.

Villafuerte is entangled in the railroading of Denver ICE agent Cory Voorhis — whom federal prosecutors tried to punish after he blew the whistle on sweetheart deals for criminal illegal aliens during the 2006 gubernatorial campaign. A jury acquitted Voorhis of all federal charges. He’s trying to get his job back. At least one of his supervisors has admitted lying.

Villafuerte served on Democrat gubernatorial candidate Bill Ritter’s campaign team while on leave from the Denver D.A.’s office and from all local news accounts was deeply involved in the witchhunt against agent Voorhis.

But she refuses to answer any questions about her role in the case.

And now she is poised to take over as US Attorney.

Transparency? Ethics? Accountability? Anyone?

[...]

Read the whole thing.  The rotten mess that is the Obama administration just keeps getting smellier and smellier.

By Tim Graham

In fact, a conservative revival is happening!

Brent Bozell was hardly alone yesterday in touting new polls showing a surge for conservatism in reaction to Barack Obama’s forever-lengthening statist agenda. Also making the rounds is Nile Gardiner’s blog for the Telegraph (of the UK) suggesting President Obama has failed to defeat American conservatism:

  This week’s striking Gallup poll on political ideology is further confirmation that the United States is in essence a conservative nation, which has ironically become even more conservative under Barack Obama. According to Gallup, 40 percent of Americans describe their political views as conservative, 36 percent as moderate and 20 percent as liberal. This is the first time conservatives have outnumbered moderates in America since 2004.

  [...]

After running through the Gallup numbers, Gardner concluded:

  Last November, liberal commentators wrote off conservatism in America as dead and buried. As the latest Gallup poll shows they were spectacularly wrong. It is no coincidence that the most watched news network, the top selling national newspaper, and the most listened to radio shows in the United States are now all conservative.

  The success of Fox News, The Wall Street Journal and talk radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Mark Levin, is a powerful symbol of a vigorous challenge to current liberal dominance of Washington. The vast conservative blogosphere is also an increasingly influential force, from National Review’s The Corner to The Drudge Report, as are leading conservative commentators such as Charles Krauthammer. Combine that with a huge rise in membership this year for grass roots conservative groups campaigning against higher taxes, socialized health care, increased government spending, and defence cuts, and you have the foundations of another conservative revolution.

  The spirit of Ronald Reagan is alive and well in America, exemplified by strong public backing for the principles of limited government, free enterprise, individual responsibility and a strong defence. The White House should sit up and take note: it is liberalism, and not conservatism, that is in decline in the United States.

Real Americans are mobilizing to take back our country from the extreme left wing Dem Party.

The Democrats’ latest sales pitch for a govt takeover of our healthcare industry is to call it a “public option”, but is it really?  The govt wants to be one of the competitors in the market, while it also sets the rules and regulations, including taxes; wouldn’t that be a conflict of interest?

What is to stop the govt from writing the rules, regulations and tax law to favor the govt enterprises, and get an unfair advantage over the private competitors?

If the Health Insurance industry got to set the rules, regulations and taxes, that would be clearly a conflict of interest, wouldn’t it?  Likewise for either the Doctors or the Pharmaceutical Industry, right?

IMO, a real public option would consist of having the public, especially those who are consumers of healthcare, set the rules, regulations and taxes.  That way, prices would be affordable, insurance policies would be tailored to the needs of the individual, and there would be lots of choices.  Sounds like a great idea, right?

Oh, wait!  We already have that!  It’s called “the free market”, where the public gets to vote with its dollars for the doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies that they want, and aren’t forced to pay for any insurance, doctors or pharmaceuticals that they don’t want.  Everything is paid for by the people that use it, when they use it.  There’s no outside coercion, and the products/services have to be affordable, else they won’t sell.

Why not do that?

Find it here

Obama Barackette

Maybe the birth certificate controversy should be over whether or not Obama is a little girl. Because he’s acting like one.

by Frank J. Fleming

A conspiracy theory has been going around for some time that Barack Obama is hiding his real birth certificate because he is actually constitutionally ineligible to be president. Like most respectable conservatives, I’ve stayed away from such conjecture so as not to get the crazy on me, but now I’ve been having second thoughts.

Many of Obama’s recent actions have made him seem quite suspect, and I’m beginning to think there is good reason to believe he is not eligible to be our president as outlined by our Founding Fathers in the Constitution. About the office of the president, Article 2, Section 1 clearly states: “neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years.”

Thus I believe Obama is not qualified as he is, in fact, a little girl.

[...]

This is an important question, and we should treat it seriously. Now I know partisan hacks are going to scream, “He’s not a little girl! Shut up shut up shut up!” But the evidence is devastating. Just look at Obama’s foreign policy since taking office. As enemies like Iran oppress their people and move towards obtaining nuclear weapons, does he strike back against them forcefully like any real man would? No, that’s too scary for him. Tough talk like that would make him hug his dolly. He just wants to talk and be nice so no one yells at him.

He even tried inviting Iran to a barbecue. That sounds a lot like a sissy little girl too afraid to stand up to people. Any day now, he might invite Ahmadinejad over to play house with him. Obama even took missile defense out of Eastern Europe because he didn’t want people getting all angry — just the sort of thing a little girl would worry about. For wimpy actions like this, Norway awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize, which is basically a prize awarded to people in recognition of them being dainty little girls.

Even greater evidence of Obama being a little girl, though, is his girlish whining. He’s constantly whining about his predecessor President Bush, screaming “that’s not fair!” anytime someone suggests he might need to shoulder some responsibility for the economy (and aren’t his trillions in spending for a country in debt something anyone smarter than a little girl would have instantly seen as a problem?). Obama is also constantly throwing tantrums about the Republicans opposing him.

Now, if an adult were president and his party had large majorities in the House and Senate, he’d probably just go ahead and pass the legislation he wanted without worrying about opposition from the other party. Little girls aren’t that rational, though; they just want to scream and cry about anyone saying mean things about them. Just like Obama.

Of course, the whining hasn’t stopped with just the Republicans. Let’s say you’re the most powerful man in the world, with armies and nukes, facing terrorists and rogue nations while your economy is collapsing. What do you focus on? Now, let’s say you still have all that power and all those threats, but you’re a melodramatic little girl. Now what do you focus on? That’s right: Fox News saying mean things about you. We have a president who could easily wipe countries off the map with the push of a button crying about one network allowing bad things to be said about him. What possible rational explanation could there be for that? At some point, we would need a conspiracy theory to prove he’s not a whiny little girl.

[...]

With the evidence suggesting that Obama is in fact female and no more than eight-years-old, his Hawaii certification is obviously a forgery, and our country is currently at great risk. Any day now, North Korea could offer to get him a pony in exchange for nuclear secrets, and that little girl Obama would probably jump at the offer (unless he’s scared of ponies). So we need to declare his presidency unconstitutional and eject him from office. But when we throw him out, we’d better by him a new Barbie doll or something, or he’ll never stop crying.

Funny stuff.  Read the whole thing.

Find it here

Obama Taking Us On Path To Fascism

By HERB DENENBERG

During the last presidential campaign, I said there was a light whiff of fascism coming from the Obama campaign. That was based on its habit of improperly trying to repress criticism of every kind. Example: A Chicago radio station was planning on airing a critic of President Obama, who was publicizing the candidate’s close association with terrorist Bill Ayres. The Obama campaign organized a call-in campaign to flood the station with calls and prevent the critic from being heard. Anther example: The Obama campaign warned that any critics in Missouri would be subjected to prosecution there if they voiced criticism that was not true. There was a “Barack Obama Truth Squad” made up of prosecutors and sheriffs to keep critics in line, promising rebuttals and prosecution in appropriate cases (NewsBusters, September 29, 2008).

Now that whiff has turned into a strong stench of fascism, as the Obama Administration uses the vast resources of the federal government to squelch criticism and silence and intimidate critics. Here are some of the recent examples of that:

• The administration has organized a concerted campaign to marginalize, demonize, de-legitimize and destroy Fox Cable News simply because it, virtually alone among broadcast outlets, originates strong criticism of the Obama Administration and asks tough questions about what it is trying to do. Obama spokesmen, including Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Senior Advisor David Axelrod have said, in effect, that Fox is just an arm of the Republican Party and is not a legitimate news organization. Obama spokesmen say the station has a perspective. There are several answers to this. First, its news programs (as opposed to its opinion and commentary programs featuring the likes of Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck) pre- sent both sides of issues in a fair and balanced manner, and that has been confirmed by the survey of a respected research organization. The Pew Research Center found, by a wide margin,  Fox had the most objective coverage of the last presidential campaign. Second, it is true that opinion programs have a “perspective, ” but that is true of all opinion programs including those on other networks such as MSNBC. Third, the White House doesn’t complain about networks or broadcasters with a Democratic perspective, even though they dominate the dial. In fact, with the exception of Fox, all the major broadcasters have a liberal and Democratic Party perspective, admittedly some in much stronger form than others. The White House is not only trying to intimidate Fox but is clearly also trying to fire a warning shot at any broadcasters that might take the same path as Fox. This is the way Fox reported that development (October 19, 2009): “White House chief of staff Mr. Emanuel told CNN on Sunday that President Obama does not want “the CNNs and the others in the world [to] basically be led in following Fox.” Obama senior advisor Mr. Axelrod went further by calling on media outlets to join the administration in declaring that Fox is “not a news organization.”

[...]

• When a health insurance company that marketed Medicare policies tried to warn its policyholders that Obamacare would hurt seniors’ insurance programs, the Department of Health and Human Services issued on a gag order on such communications with policyholders. It also said that the warning was misleading, which it was not. The gag order was since revoked, but its initial promulgation tells you something about the mentality of the White House and its attitude toward criticism. The Washington Post reported on the “gag order” as follows: “The federal government has ordered health insurers to stop telling Medicare beneficiaries that proposed health reform legislation could hurt seniors and jeopardize their benefits. The government might take enforcement action against insurers that have tried to mobilize opposition to the legislation by sending their enrollees “misleading and confusing” messages, a senior official of the Department of Health and Human Services said in a memo…” Query: Who will take action against Mr. Obama for the countless lies he’s telling in an effort to sell Obamacare?

[...]

• Mr. Obama and his administration are willing to tell lies,  and big lies, over and over again, perhaps on the Goebbels theory that if you tell a big enough lie often enough it will be believed. One of the Obama lies that I found particularly irksome was his claim after the Senate Committee passed a version of Obamacare that it was a bipartisan product. In fact, Obamacare had finally garnered one Republican supporter (Senator Olympia “Republican in Name Only” Snowe, R., Me.) out of a Congress with 535 members. What’s worse, in the legislative process, the Republicans were frozen out and “did not have a seat at the table” to use one of Obama’s favorite figures of speech.

[...]

•  Mr. Obama and Democratic Congressional leaders have expressed support for the Employee Free Choice Act, which would abolish the secret ballot in union elections. This shows the willingness of Mr. Obama and the Democratic Party leadership to do anything to satisfy the demands of one of their voting constituencies. In this case, it’s the labor bosses, who want to revive their fortunes by making it easy to organize new unions – without the need to pass the test of a secret ballot obtaining the right to organize a union.

[...]

•  Mr. Obama and the Democratic Congress have been willing to indulge in outrageous anti-democratic techniques to get legislation passed: Not reading a bill before it is signed, not posting the bill on the Internet prior to voting on it, as promised, and keeping negotiations secret and one-sided, also in conflict with promises.

I’ve emphasized one aspect of fascism – its objective of the forcible suppression of opposition. But it also qualifies under the other elements, including the suppression of private enterprise and putting it under centralized government control. That is one hallmark of the Obama Administration, it expands government, contracts the private sector and places new and unprecedented power in the hands of a centralized, expanding government bureaucracy.

This government expansion also is a restriction of our freedom because as the government gets bigger, the individual citizen gets smaller. Consider some of the belief systems of his Czars. Ron Bloom, the manufacturing czar thinks the “free market is nonsense.”

[...]

The part of Obama’s fascism that includes growing the govt at the expense of the private sector is the primary driver of his deepening recession, characterized by no real economic growth(a hallmark of non-free enterprise economic systems) and increasing unemployment.
All of his “programs” or “plans” are designed for one purpose only: Increasing his power at our expense.

Used by permission, charts at link:

Every now and then, a leftie tells the truth.  Barney must be getting arrogant.

Find it here

WASHINGTON - During consideration of H.R. 3126, legislation to establish a Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA), Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee voted to pass an amendment offered by Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) that will make ACORN eligible to play a role in setting regulations for financial institutions.

[...]

By making representatives of ACORN and other consumer activist organizations eligible to serve on the Oversight Board, the amendment creates a potentially enormous government sanctioned conflict of interest.  ACORN-type organizations will have an advisory role on regulating the very financial institutions from which they receive millions of dollars annually in direct corporate contributions and benefit from other financial partnerships and arrangements.  These are the same organizations that pressured banks to make subprime mortgage loans and thus bear a major responsibility for the collapse of the housing market.

In light of recent evidence linking ACORN to possible criminal activity, Democrats took an unprecedented step today to give ACORN a potential role alongside bank regulators in overseeing financial institutions.  This is contrary to recent actions taken by the Senate and House to block federal funds to ACORN.

A recent inquiry into bank funding of ACORN activities by three House Committees found that institutions that would be regulated by the CFPA have provided millions of dollars to the organization in the form of direct donations, lines of credit, cash, and other assets over the last 15 years.

The Waters amendment passed on a vote of 35-33. Click here to view the vote.

Just more Dem thuggery and an open door for more political terrorism by ACORN.