Category Archives: Politics

Another reason to not trust Obamacare

I am so fortunate that I have health care provided by my employer.

We all have heard the troubles that the healthcare.gov website has had with uptime and stability. However, what hasn’t really been discussed is the site’s poor security.

The data obtained by Healthcare.gov is one of the largest collections of personal information ever assembled. It links information between seven different federal agencies and state agencies and government contractors.

The website requires users to provide personal information like birth dates, social security numbers, and household incomes in order to obtain information about potential health coverage. But security experts have expressed concern about flaws in the site that put this personal data at risk and subject users to the threat of identity theft.

One of our witnesses, David Kennedy, is a “white hat hacker,” who is hired by companies around the world to test the security of their online systems by essentially hacking their websites. During the hearing, Mr. Kennedy gave a demonstration of the healthcare.gov website’s vulnerabilities showing in real-time that hackers can access personal information on the website. It’s clear that not only is the website vulnerable, it’s under attack.

When asked whether he believed the website had already been compromised by hackers, Mr. Kennedy testified that he believed the website has either already been hacked or soon will be.

The massive amount of personal information collected by the Healthcare.gov website creates a tempting target for scam artists. Identity theft jeopardizes credit ratings and personal finances.

Source: EXCLUSIVE — MR. PRESIDENT, TEAR DOWN THIS WEBSITE

Additionally, aside from the technological problems, the navigators, which are there to help the public navigate the site, have not received background checks and yet have access to thousands of people’s private health records.

The Obamacare legislation is absolutely horrendous. Giving all this information to the government is irresponsible. If I did not have health insurance already, I would rather pay the fine than surrender personal information voluntarily to the government. I would at least want multiple non-government independent auditors to verify the security of the site as well as provide transparency on who has viewed my information. Hospitals are required to have records of the time and people that access medical records…why shouldn’t the government be held to the same standards?

Obama’s presidency so far seems constructed to pave the way to a totalitarian system. The ultimate goal is total reliance on the government from everything from health care to what we should be teaching our children. If we don’t make the transition back to smaller government, history will look back on the Obama presidency as the beginning of the decline of American supremacy. (Full disclosure, I feel that the last few Presidents, including GWB contributed to the problem by increasing debt but just not as quickly or to the level that Obama has forced.)

Somewhere there are socialists in their graves laughing as the United States tries her hand at centralized planning. You’d think that with nearly the entire 20th century being a showcase of failed communist states, we’d learn. Obama and the democrats must not have studied history or paid attention the day they were supposed to read Orwell’s 1984.

As George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

My Thought on the Debt Crisis & Government Shutdown

I am truly scared for the future of the United States. Wasn’t it just a few months ago that we were having another discussion in Congress related to raising the debt limit? That disaster was averted by allowing the sequestration cuts. What I don’t understand is how this is all happening again. It should simply be a matter of not spending more than you make.

Rather than continuing to raise the debt limit, why don’t we decrease spending or at least hold it at the level of inflation. Congress should be forced to pass a balanced budget each year that does not spend more than it takes in in taxes (exceptions could be made for War and other emergencies). The welfare and entitlement system should be overhauled so that only truly qualified people are allowed to be on it as a temporizing measure. Revenue increasing (code word for increasing taxes) is not the way to go about it.

The United States, I think, is not too far gone that we could still save ourselves if the federal government just stepped out of the way. Lower taxes to encourage productivity. Increase the number of green cards available for the talented foreigners that would still love to come to this country. And, we must do this before China grabs them with talks of their version of what has always been called, ‘the American Dream.’

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Rising Inequality Under Obama

Obama proclaimed in [his] second Inaugural Address, “our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.” But that is exactly what is happening under Obama’s economy.

Under Reagan, the rich got richer and the poor got richer. After Reaganomics took hold in 1983, incomes for every quintile, from the top 20% to the bottom 20%, rose. The poverty rate also declined for every year thereafter while Reagan was President.

But President Obama is following exactly the opposite of every policy of Reaganomics, so he is getting basically the opposite results. The incomes of the top 20% have still been rising under Obama. But the incomes of everyone else, the bottom 80%, have been falling!

Source: The American Spectator: Obama’s Rising Inequality

And, from the Investor Business Daily:

Research by University of California economist Emmanuel Saez shows that since the Obama recovery started in June 2009, the average income of the top 1% grew 11.2% in real terms through 2011.

The bottom 99%, in contrast, saw their incomes shrink by 0.4%.

As a result, 121% of the gains in real income during Obama’s recovery have gone to the top 1%. By comparison, the top 1% captured 65% of income gains during the Bush expansion of 2002-07, and 45% of the gains under Clinton’s expansion in the 1990s.

The Census Bureau’s official measure of income inequality — called the Gini index — shows similar results. During the Bush years, the index was flat overall — finishing in 2008 exactly where it started in 2001.

It’s gone up each year since Obama has been president and now stands at all-time highs.

Heck, even the liberal Daily Kos understands this: Income Inequality has grown much faster under Obama than George W. Bush

Obamaphones

Here’s one more example of why our government is in so much debt. There’s just so many examples of this that it is outrageous!

Confession: You’re paying my phone bill.

In the past month, I have received three shiny new cell phones, courtesy of American taxpayers, that should never have fallen into my hands.

The Federal Communications Commission oversees the so-called Lifeline program, created in 1984 to make sure impoverished Americans had telephone service available to call their moms, bosses, and 911. In 2008, the FCC expanded the program to offer subsidized cell-phone service, and since then, the expenses of running the program have soared. In 2012, the program’s costs had risen to $2.189 billion, up from $822 million before wireless carriers were included. As of June, there were 13.8 million active Lifeline subscriptions.

To be eligible for Lifeline, the applicant is supposed to be receiving some significant government benefit — food stamps, Medicaid, Supplemental Security Income, public housing assistance, etc. But because welfare eligibility has expanded under the Obama administration, more people than ever before are qualified to receive “free” cell-phone service — part of the reason why Lifeline mobiles have become commonly known as Obamaphones. Alternatively, applicants can qualify if their household income is less than 136 percent of the federal poverty line.

Continue reading at National Review Online: Me and My Obamaphones

And, of course you can’t talk about Obamaphones without including the obligatory and classic YouTube video:

Scary

Blocked: With emotions high and traffic stopped, tensions rose as protestors blocked the Los Angeles freeway Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2362973/Protests-erupt-coast-coast-George-Zimmerman-goes-FREE-Second-day-demonstrations-planned-night-anger.html#ixzz2ZBMyeW8J

Blocked: With emotions high and traffic stopped, tensions rose as protestors blocked the Los Angeles freeway
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2362973/Protests-erupt-coast-coast-George-Zimmerman-goes-FREE-Second-day-demonstrations-planned-night-anger.html#ixzz2ZBMyeW8J

Halted: Traffic came to a halt Sunday evening on Los Angeles' I-10 freeway as Trayvon Martin supporters swarmed the road in protest of his killer's acquittal, stopping all traffic Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2362973/Protests-erupt-coast-coast-George-Zimmerman-goes-FREE-Second-day-demonstrations-planned-night-anger.html#ixzz2ZBMdRBea

Halted: Traffic came to a halt Sunday evening on Los Angeles’ I-10 freeway as Trayvon Martin supporters swarmed the road in protest of his killer’s acquittal, stopping all traffic
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2362973/Protests-erupt-coast-coast-George-Zimmerman-goes-FREE-Second-day-demonstrations-planned-night-anger.html#ixzz2ZBMdRBea


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The GOP’s Alternative Budget

Under the president’s plan, spending will top $4 trillion this year alone, and consume 28.5% of our nation’s economy. His plan would mean a $1 trillion increase to the already unsustainable spending growth of our nation’s entitlement programs — including a “down payment” toward government-controlled health care and education; a $1.5 trillion tax increase to further shackle the small businesses and investors we rely on to create jobs; a massive increase in energy costs for families via cap and trade. Moreover, the Obama plan would result in an exploding deficit, a doubling of the nation’s debt in five years, and an increase of that debt to more than 82% of our nation’s GDP by the last year of the budget. This approach will ultimately debase our currency and reduce the living standards of the American people.

Instead of doubling the debt in five years, and tripling it in 10, the Republican budget curbs the explosion in spending called for by the president and his party. Our plan halts the borrow-and-spend philosophy that brought about today’s economic problems, and puts a stop to heaping ever-growing debt on future generations — and it does so by controlling spending, not by raising taxes. The greatest difference lies in the size of government our budgets achieve over time (see nearby chart).

Continue to read on The Wall Street Journal Opinion Article

This article is written by Mr. Paul Ryan, from Wisconsin, who is the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee. It talks about the Republican’s alternative plan to Obama’s “European-style big government” that “works to accomplish four main goals: 1) fulfill the mission of health and retirement security; 2) control our nation’s debts; 3) put the economy on a path of growth and leadership in the global economy; and 4) preserve the American legacy of leaving the next generation better off.”

What Stimulus?

They call it “stimulus” legislation, but the economic measures racing through Congress would devote tens of billions of dollars to causes that have little to do with jolting the country out of recession.

Yes, there are many billions of dollars in “ready-to-go” job-creating projects in President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus bill. But there are also plenty of items that are just unfinished business for Congress’ old bulls.

Analysis: Stimulus bill that’s not all stimulating

According to Congressional Budget Office estimates, a mere $26 billion of the House stimulus bill’s $355 billion in new spending would actually be spent in the current fiscal year, and just $110 billion would be spent by the end of 2010. This is highly embarrassing given that Congress’s justification for passing this bill so urgently is to help the economy right now, if not sooner.
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Detroit Auto Bailout?

Richard Shelby, the top Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, expresses what my feelings are on the subject: He says,

“The financial situation facing the Big Three is not a national problem, but their problem,” Shelby said in a statement this week. “I do not support the use of U.S. taxpayer dollars to reward the mismanagement of Detroit-based auto manufacturers in such a way that allows them to continue and compound their ongoing mistakes.”

The Weekly Standard has a good opinion article on the topic.

Intolerance in the classroom

As the media keeps gushing on about how America has finally adopted tolerance as the great virtue, and that we’re all united now, let’s consider the Brave Catherine Vogt Experiment.

Catherine Vogt, 14, is an Illinois 8th grader, the daughter of a liberal mom and a conservative dad. She wanted to conduct an experiment in political tolerance and diversity of opinion at her school in the liberal suburb of Oak Park.

She noticed that fellow students at Gwendolyn Brooks Middle School overwhelmingly supported Barack Obama for president. His campaign kept preaching “inclusion,” and she decided to see how included she could be.

So just before the election, Catherine consulted with her history teacher, then bravely wore a unique T-shirt to school and recorded the comments of teachers and students in her journal. The T-shirt bore the simple yet quite subversive words drawn with a red marker:

“McCain Girl.”

“I was just really curious how they’d react to something that different, because a lot of people at my school wore Obama shirts and they are big Obama supporters,” Catherine told us. “I just really wanted to see what their reaction would be.”

Immediately, Catherine learned she was stupid for wearing a shirt with Republican John McCain’s name. Not merely stupid. Very stupid.

“People were upset. But they started saying things, calling me very stupid, telling me my shirt was stupid and I shouldn’t be wearing it,” Catherine said.

Then it got worse. …

Continue reading, Tolerance fails T-shirt test.

She ultimately turned her experience in as a history report. And then as a class they discussed the issues of intolerance:

… she turned her journal into a report for her history teacher, earning Catherine extra credit. We asked the teacher, Norma Cassin-Pountney, whether it was ironic that Catherine would be subject to such intolerance from pro-Obama supporters in a community that prides itself on its liberal outlook.

“That’s what we discussed,” Cassin-Pountney said about the debate in the classroom when the experiment was revealed. “I said, here you are, promoting this person [Obama] that believes we are all equal and included, and look what you’ve done? The students were kind of like, ‘Oh, yeah.’ I think they got it.”

In order to be more scientific, this would have needed to be a coordinated effort throughout the country. For example, with this single test, we don’t know what the reaction would have been had Catherine worn the Obama t-shirt first. An interesting experiment still.