Down Is Up

Continuing where we left off.

You gotta like this guy. Straight-talking and spot-on.

Or a one-note band. Take your pick.

Thanks to the Republican National Committee for putting this together.

On the day I took office, our auto industry was on the verge of collapse. Some even said we should let it die. With a million jobs at stake, I refused to let that happen. In exchange for help, we demanded responsibility. We got workers and automakers to settle their differences. We got the industry to retool and restructure. Today, General Motors is back on top as the world’s number one automaker. Chrysler has grown faster in the U.S. than any major car company. Ford is investing billions in U.S. plants and factories. And together, the entire industry added nearly 160,000 jobs.

We bet on American workers. We bet on American ingenuity. And tonight, the American auto industry is back.

And:

It’s time to apply the same rules from top to bottom: No bailouts, no handouts, and no copouts. An America built to last insists on responsibility from everybody.

Thanks Jonah! I’d put that up with ’shovel-ready jobs’!

Comes, not surprising, comes from Churchill

“All men are created equal’ says the American Declaration of Independence. ‘All men shall be kept equal’ say the Socialists.”

Great piece from Jim DeMint:

When President Obama lectures the nation about “fairness” and “middle-class values” in his State of the Union address this evening, Americans ought to consider how dismissive his policies have been of those values, and how unfair they have been to middle-class families.

Above all else, hardworking, middle-class Americans want to ensure a better life for their children. They want to know if they work hard, play by the rules, and live within their means, that those defining middle-class values will be rewarded.

For the last three years, those values have only been punished. Set aside the president’s words, and look at his actions.

Listening to the first 5 minutes of the State of the Union, it is clear this is class-warfare at its finest and this will be the shibboleth going into November.

Three years into Obamanomics, with millions of jobs lost and businesses shuttered, who exactly has benefited?

The big banks that plunged the world into financial crisis are bigger than ever. Government-backed mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which spurred banks to make those reckless loans, went untouched in the Wall Street reform bill and instead received over $180 billion in taxpayer bailouts. Auto companies so poorly run that they lost money on every car they sold were seized by the federal government, given billions of taxpayer dollars, and handed over to political cronies in the bargain. Green-energy company Solyndra was given $500 million of taxpayer money before it went bankrupt, not due to its technological innovativeness, but because it was politically connected to the Obama campaign.

The hundreds of billions of dollars the president directed to his political cronies could have, if left in the real economy, launched new enterprises and created thousands of new jobs. As it is, though, the American economy, and the middle class families who sustain it, have nothing to show for the president’s so-called “investments.”

Then there’s Obamacare, which robbed $500 billion from the already failing Medicare program to force millions of middle class families from their insurance onto government-rationed care. Obama promised insurance premiums would go down, but the Kaiser Family Foundation found the average employer-based premium for a family increased 9 percent, or $1,303, in 2011. Rates are expected to double over the next 10 years.

and

Obama continues to insist that big government is good for the middle class. He says it’s not right and it’s not fair that the wealthy are making more money while the poor and middle class are having a harder time than ever climbing up the economic ladder.

But what is really holding them back?

Lousy schools. Exploding health-care costs. Rampant dependency and family breakdown. Companies that can no longer offer jobs in the United States because it’s become too expensive to operate here. Smothering regulations. Untapped energy resources and blocked shovel-ready projects like the Keystone Pipeline.

But what do all of those things — things that once worked and now do not — have in common? Government.

Over the last two generations, for the first time in our history, the federal government seized control of our education system, our health-care system, our financial system, our housing industry, our transportation system, our energy industry, our taxes, our welfare state, and our economic regulations.

Big government is what got us into this mess. The president believes only even bigger government can get us out. But the last three years have shown — once again — that it won’t.

Hopefully Middle America understands this.

The president wants us to believe that we need big government to protect the middle class. The truth is that we need to protect the middle class from big government.

There’s a simple question that middle-class families should ask themselves that reveals the true state of our union. Are you better off than you were $4 trillion ago?

At the end, according to the Obama tonight, “it’s all Bush’s fault.” He didn’t say it directly. Instead he says “we’re not going to succeed on policies that brought this on….”

DeMint speaks the truth. Pass it on!

Thanks to the faithful reader who shared this

As noted before, Walker’s job is on the line because the dummycrats and public sector unions lost in a democratically held election. I have heard anything from 500,000 to 1,000,000 signatures collected. How many of them are legitimate, it’s hard to say. If you haven’t signed up to scour the signatures, please do so. I have tested the system and it’s pretty straight forward – all it takes from you is time. It will be time well spent, now and in the future.

The problem is that he left are ideologues, pure and simple. It’s not about right and wrong because if it was, they’d give up because, as noted before, Walker’s plan is working! Even the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel says so.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which opposed Walker’s collective bargaining reforms, recently noted, “The governor did balance the budget … he did reduce the structural deficit significantly; he did put a lid on property tax increases; he did give schools and municipalities more control over their budgets than they’ve had in years.”
What’s more, the reforms pushed by Walker are themselves already having a beneficial effect. Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett was Walker’s opponent in the 2010 election and later attacked his proposals to reform collective bargaining. But with the reforms on the books, Barrett used some of the bill’s provisions to help reduce the city’s health care bill, saying that the alternative was to cut 300 to 400 city jobs.
Here’s why the stakes in Wisconsin are so high. Public employee unions understand that the legitimacy of collective bargaining privileges is now in question, as cash-strapped states struggle under the burden of a costly public sector. If they can knock off Walker, they send a powerful signal to other reform-oriented governors not to target collective bargaining.

This is what we’re fighting for!
Thanks to the alert reader who sent this along!

Hmmmm…..hard to say. Why do you ask?

President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign and its key supporters are looking to grow on a national scale a fundraising effort targeting rich individual donors that was successful in its Democratic stronghold of Chicago, according to sources familiar with the program.

and

President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign and its Democratic allies announced on January 12 that they raised more than $68 million in the last three months of 2011, eclipsing his Republican rivals in the White House race.

Thanks to an alert reader!

Two different articles that I think are shades of the same. If you’re wondering about the “change” part of Obama’s agenda and ideology, look no further than these two articles. First, cronyism and pay-backs at their finest:

After Solyndra’s collapse, a handful of journalists have continued to dig into the Administration’s efforts to fund the energy sector, and what they’ve found isn’t pretty. CBS News, for instance, reports there are many more Solyndras, uncovering a dozen energy companies that are having financial trouble after receiving a total of $6.5 billion from the federal government. This should not be a big surprise. The federal government has never been good at picking winners and losers. Further, as the Washington Post reported last month, politics “infused” the Administration’s energy efforts.

Emphasis added.
Second, is an article about the risks of rationing related with Obamacare.

If anyone was interested in how Obamacare might lead incrementally to the health-care industry’s form of “Liberal Fascism,” look no further than today’s New York Times article on the recently announced disclosure requirements for medical firms (“U.S. to Force Drug Firms to Report Money Paid to Doctors“), The goal, of course, is laudable — make doctors tell their patients if they receive compensation from drug and medical-device makers.
snip
perhaps the most telling part of the NYT reporting on the policy is the complete lack of reference to whether this will improve health outcomes. The Times reports that “researchers” (including its own reporting) have found that doctors that take money from drug companies tend “practice medicine differently” and prescribe more expensive and sometimes riskier medicines. But the real issue is whether there are improved outcomes for the patient, not whether it’s more or less expensive or even more risky. It’s the patient and the doctor that should decide the relative merits of the risk involved with any particular treatment.

Emphasis added.
Rationing is something we have spoken about before. It will happen. The numbers demonstrate it – but why let scientific data get in the way? (see Global Warming) Moreover, this historical precedent demonstrates it – just look at Europe. No! Down Is Up, you’re making it up! There’s no reason to read the Obamacare bill!