Never anger a heathen, a snake, or a pupil.
Talmud
For Crying Out Loud, Obama: Grow Up!
There are a couple of recent news items which really call into question the mature judgment of our Nobel Laureate President. First, Barack Obama decides to make the third high-profile diplomatic incident with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu this month by basically walking out of their meeting to have dinner with Michelle and their daughters. (No doubt settling a sibling dispute between Sasha and Malia has higher priority over Israeli-Palestinian negotations...) Obama's boorish behavior seems to be his way of expressing displeasure with Netanyahu's position on home construction in Jewish neighborhoods in east Jerusalem. While Obama has repeatedly attacked Bush for allegedly destroying America's image abroad, what is the approval rating of Obama in one of America's strongest allies, Israel? According to a recent poll in today's Jerusalem Post, just 9% of Israelis consider Obama to be pro-Israel, versus 88% for George W. Bush. It leads one to wonder just how coherent is Obama's foreign policy: whereas Obama won the much coveted praise of American adversary Communist dictator Fidel Castro for ObamaCare this past Thursday and last summer a valued present of an anti-American screed (Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent) from Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, shouldn't he spend at least as much due diligence with America's closest allies? Who will ever forget that special touch Obama showed in gifting British Prime Minister Gordon Brown with a set of DVD's in a format that doesn't play on British players and then last September turned down 5 times Brown's request for a meeting around the time of the G20 summit (while, of course, Obama had time to meet with leaders of China, Japan, and Russia)?
The second incident involves Obama's schoolyard taunt "Go for it" at a recent self-congratulatory rally to Republicans, promising to run on "repeal and replace" the partisan health care bill/law in this fall's election. Isn't it refreshing that all those progressives whom had castigated Bush for the provocative message to insurgents and terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan to "bring 'em on" know whom the real enemy is--namely, Republicans? Listen, Mr. Obama: someone has to clean up after your mess. Someone is going to run to against counterproductive "soak-the-rich"/business/investment (and job) crippling tax increases, smoke and mirrors accounting (with phantom Medicare cuts and grossly underestimated costs and exaggerated revenues), progressive entitlement Ponzi schemes that make Madoff look like an amateur, rampant government hiring (at an average wage far above the median American earner)--especially for several new platoons of America's favorite bureaucrats: the IRS, just to make sure you are buying health insurance approved by progressive bureaucracies (instead of traditional state regulation)... Maybe instead of shoving an unsatisfactory, unpopular corrupt partisan bill down the nation's throat, you could have engaged in LEGITIMATE bipartisan negotiations, instead of this nonsense of trying to peel off one or 2 GOP votes or cherry-pick a couple of minor, watered-down GOP ideas and deem the result "bipartisan". Let's see, who was that national candidate whom once said, "You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig"?
ObamaCare Is Already Hitting Corporate Financial Statements
As if anyone needed any further proof of the utter economic incompetence of the progressives in Congress and the Obama Administration, take into account the wave of write-offs hitting Wall Street, including $1B in health "reform" costs in the first quarter for telecommunication industry leader AT&T (i.e., Southwestern Bell). Now when the Bush Administration in its first term pushed through the new Medicare entitlement (prescription drugs), there was a desire to hold down costs; many corporations (including AT&T) had existing retiree prescription drug benefits. Let's say, for purposes of simplification, that the cost to the government for Medicare drug coverage was a net burden of $1200 per beneficiary. In effect, the government was willing to provide tax benefits and/or subsidies of up to $600 per retiree to maintain its existing benefit program: a win-win for both parties: even if the government was paying $600 per retiree, it was still saving $600 per person if that same retiree applied for the Medicare benefit, say, if the corporation simply dumped its retiree benefit on the backs of the American taxpayer.
Now the progressives are in power, and in their omnipotence, they view corporate tax-advantaged benefits as "loopholes": they think that they can take back the incentive to corporations and the corporations will have no alternative but at the expense of their stakeholders to both pay more taxes and pay for a cost burden that the government is assuming for other non-company retirees.
Take a wild guess as to how this scenario is going to play out: businesses and the government made a deal several years ago. The government, now dominated by progressives, decides to renege on the deal. This is the equivalent of unilaterally increasing labor costs. The companies now assume total cost burden of what the government assumes for enrolled retirees. That will now change. Money is fungible; maybe the company will sweeten other retiree benefits to compensate for dropping their share of the benefit. But now the government will assume the full cost burden for all retirees. Progressives are lousy at math--and they've just added to the $38T unfunded Medicare mandate.
Political Cartoon
There is a play on words in Dana Summers' cartoon. We taxpayers, the next generations, and the states are going to have sticker shock over the Democratic Party Health Care Bill. But with a nearly $3T budget deficit (BEFORE health care "reform"), the progressives' hyper tax-and-spend agenda constitutes political malpractice, and there's no company, no other country (e.g., China), with the resources to provide taxpayer coverage at any price.
Musical Interlude: Tonight Songs
Bob Seger, "We've Got Tonight"
Rod Stewart, "Tonight's the Night"
Bay City Rollers, "The Way I Feel Tonight"
Elton John, "Can You Feel the Love Tonight?"
