So we are spending $2.5 million dollars so that we can feel better about the Census?

Aren’t we broke? Social Security is now broke and in the red. Story here. Moody’s just announced that the United States might lose its AAA credit rating. Link to that news story here.

HotAir covers the Census Super Bowl ad story here. I think this scene from the movie Dave sums it up for everyone. Enjoy.

Kevin Kline did a great job in that movie. I think Ben Kingsley’s role as Vice President was interesting as well. I have a few thoughts on his character in that movie. I’ll have to find the right video clip first.

O’Keefe appeared on Hannity last night. Video below:

Interesting to note from one of the statements by Andrew Breitbart. Link here.

Earlier Monday, the man who first published James O’Keefe’s explosive videos exposing wrongdoing at community organizer ACORN came to the filmmaker’s defense, claiming he “sat in jail for 28 hours without access to an attorney” while the prosecutor made his case to the media.

O’Keefe was “framed” by the media and the U.S. attorney’s office, Andrew Breitbart, publisher of BigGovernment.com, told Fox News.

“James O’Keefe sat in jail for 28 hours without access to an attorney, while the U.S. attorney leaked the information about his arrest, helping the media frame it as ‘Watergate Junior,’” Breitbart said.

Wait – O’Keefe had to wait 28 hours for an attorney? Is that true? We know that Northwest Airlines bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was quested by the FBI for only 50 minutes and then given access to an attorney. But O’Keefe had to wait 28 hours?

Most of the media is pointing to the new campaign tell all book titled “Game Change” that mentions some statements about Barack Obama made by U.S. Senator Harry Reid (D – NV). Don’t fall for that one.

First and foremost so called “racial” statements do not count if you are a Democrat or one of Obama’s friends (see Rev. Wright). You can see that here when Obama called for Don Imus to be fired and here when he called for Trent Lott to be fired or here when he gave Reverend Wright a pass. So no it’s not about the usual Race cards.

This “race” story is about Harry Reid’s re-election race for the U.S. Senate. The race for Harry Reid’s Senate seat in 2010 is going to at best close as he has a 53% disaproval rating among voters. Story here. Reid is in trouble and the numbers show that fact everywhere.

• Poll: Reid trails by double digits
• 2010 SENATE CAMPAIGN: Polls show potential GOP challengers would beat Harry Reid
• Poll: Reid Has Weak Approval, Re-Elect Numbers In Nevada
• Commentary: Senator Harry Reid’s poll numbers don’t look good

In the last month we have seen a long time powerful democratic leader in the U.S. Senate, Chris Dodd, announce that he will retire as well as Byron Dorgan. Both were losing badly in the polls Story here.

Embattled Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd was all but forced to quit, and North Dakota Sen. Byron Dorgan also ditched his re-election effort in the face of a difficult race. Dodd’s announcement Wednesday may actually save the Democrats’ hold on his seat — the party quickly recruited a stronger candidate — but Dorgan’s retirement may cost the party a seat in his Republican-leaning state. And that would mean the loss of a critical 60th vote in the Senate.

Dodd was about to lose an election – as in down in flames. His “retirement” gives the Democrats a fresh faced to run. The same goes for other races as well. Real Clear Politics has a breakdown of the recent poll numbers here for U.S. Senate elections.

• Massachusetts U.S. Senate – (R) Brown 48, (D) Coakly 47
• Nevada U.S. Senate – (R) Tarkanian 49, (D) Reid 41
• Connecticut U.S. Senate – (D) Blumenthal 56, (R)Simmons 33 (formerly Dodd vs. Simmons)
• North Dakota U.S Senate – (R) Hoeven 58, (D) Dorgan 36
• Pennsylvania U.S. Senate – (R) Toomey 44, (D) Specter 44

So is the DNC’s political machine behind the big push in the media to talk about Reid’s statements? I say yes as they are prepping to push Harry Reid out once the Obamacare bill is passed. That bill still has too many backroom deals needed to get done so they can’t just dump the Senate Majority Leader – right now.

The Obama Chicago political machine is in charge now and Reid either doesn’t realize that he’s next on the chopping block. Maybe it’s just that he hopes for a bounce in the polls once Obamacare is passed and is out of the news. Either way he must realize that his polling numbers are very low and the machine can’t risk a lost U.S. Senate seat if they are to pass an amnesty bill in time for the 2012 election.

Democrats in Massachusetts have a plan in place to keep Scott Brown from getting to the U.S. Senate in time to vote on Obamacare if he wins. Story here. But legislation that will impact the 2012 election, such as amnesty and cap and trade, will require that other democrats in office get thrown under the bus to help Obama’s chances of not losing the Senate.

So yes the story of the day is about race – it’s just not the one the media is selling to you.

Louis Menand of The New Yorker holds his nose high in the air as he writes about Fox News. You can read his piece here if you would like some great insight as to what the New York elite think of news outlets in America and the people that watch them.

the majority of the ones who watched the most strident programs, such as Sean Hannity’s and Bill O’Reilly’s shows, were men. All that chesty fulminating apparently functions as political Cialis. Fox News shows should probably carry a warning: Contact your doctor if you have rage lasting more than four hours.

And don’t forget folks that Fox News is run by a man that helped Nixon:

In 1967, Ailes was a producer on “The Mike Douglas Show,” in Philadelphia, when he met Richard Nixon. Nixon had every reason, after his disastrous performance in the 1960 Presidential debates, to regard television with dread, but Ailes persuaded him otherwise. Ailes left “The Mike Douglas Show” to help Leonard Garment and others invent the New Nixon,

How ghastly – a newsman that worked with Republicans! Serious people should stay away:

Cable news, in short, is a sandbox. People throw things at one another, not just for fun but for profit. It is not a distinguished venue for statesmen or their surrogates to spend their time in.

I wonder if he really means stay away from MSNBC or CNN as well? And I think he glossed over their affiliations with Democratic administrations. And don’t even get me started with Stephanopoulos and ABC. Bill Clinton’s White House Chief of Staff taking over the most popular Sunday political show? Well why not – no problem there as we just witnessed with the New Yorker not even mentioning it at all in this piece regarding news shows. What a joke.

Maybe someone should point out to Louis Menand that viewers and readers across American are turning off ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and MSNBC and canceling the NY Times because most Americans are tired of holding their noses while reading intellectually dishonest pieces like his article. 

Now on to the Democratic Underground:

Democratic Underground – mail baby feces to Fox News.

The Democratic Underground is piling it on deep with member hatred of Fox News. Here is one of the videos featured on their main page “Stick It in a Box and Send it to Fox”.

Video link here. (also found on YouTube)

Investor’s Business Daily found the devil in the details. Full story here. IBD actually took the time to read the 1,018 page healthcare bill but they didn’t have to go past page 16 to find out the private health insurance would go onto the extinction list as soon as the bill is passed by Congress and signed by Obama.

Congress: It didn’t take long to run into an “uh-oh” moment when reading the House’s “health care for all Americans” bill. Right there on Page 16 is a provision making individual private medical insurance illegal.

When we first saw the paragraph Tuesday, just after the 1,018-page document was released, we thought we surely must be misreading it. So we sought help from the House Ways and Means Committee.

It turns out we were right: The provision would indeed outlaw individual private coverage. Under the Orwellian header of “Protecting The Choice To Keep Current Coverage,” the “Limitation On New Enrollment” section of the bill clearly states:

“Except as provided in this paragraph, the individual health insurance issuer offering such coverage does not enroll any individual in such coverage if the first effective date of coverage is on or after the first day” of the year the legislation becomes law.

So we can all keep our coverage, just as promised — with, of course, exceptions: Those who currently have private individual coverage won’t be able to change it. Nor will those who leave a company to work for themselves be free to buy individual plans from private carriers.

And what if you refuse to sign up for government run healthcare? You’ll get taxed. HotAir covers the details here.

As expected, the House bill would mandate that individuals and families have or buy health insurance.

But what if they don’t buy it?

Then Section 401 kicks in.  Any individual (or family) that does not have health insurance would have to pay a new tax, roughly equal to the smaller of 2.5% of your income or the cost of a health insurance plan. …

I assume the bill authors would respond, “But why wouldn’t you want insurance?  After all, we’re subsidizing it for everyone up to 400% of the poverty line.”

That is true.  But if you’re a single person with

Didn’t Barack Obama promise that he would never force anyone onto his healthcare plane? Let’s take at look at one of his campaign documents. Link here.

Q. Will I still have choice in health plans?
A. Yes. Obama’s plan actually will increase the choices available to you. If you like the insurance you have now, nothing will change under the Obama plan, except that you will pay less. If you do not have insurance you can choose to enroll in the new public plan, which will offer benefits similar to what every federal employee and member of Congress gets. Or you can choose private plan options through the national health exchange. But none of the plans will be allowed to drop you just because you get sick.

And didn’t the Health Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, say that Obama didn’t want to end private health insurance? IFAwebnews.com reports:

Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said the president doesn’t want health care reform to kill off the private health insurance system, but rather buoy it with more competition.

Kathleen Sebelius

“The president does not want to dismantle privately-owned plans,” Sebelius said on CNN’s “State of the Union with John King.” “He doesn’t want the 180 million people who have employer coverage to lose that coverage. He wants to strengthen the marketplace.”

There are lies, damned lies and then there is the Obama White House Kremlin filled with “progressive” czars.

www.thepoliticalclass.com 

The UK Telegraph has an interesting story on the declining …errrr… make that booming polar bear population. Full story at the Telegraph here. Newsbusters covers it here and Gateway Pundit follows up here.

Over the coming days a curiously revealing event will be taking place in Copenhagen. Top of the agenda at a meeting of the Polar Bear Specialist Group (set up under the International Union for the Conservation of Nature/Species Survival Commission) will be the need to produce a suitably scary report on how polar bears are being threatened with extinction by man-made global warming.

This is one of a steady drizzle of events planned to stoke up alarm in the run-up to the UN’s major conference on climate change in Copenhagen next December. But one of the world’s leading experts on polar bears has been told to stay away from this week’s meeting, specifically because his views on global warming do not accord with those of the rest of the group.

What about those stranded polar bears that all the news agencies talked about? Newsbusters reported on an Australian TV station that uncovered that story as a hoax two years ago. Story here.

Remember that wonderful picture of stranded polar bears on an ice floe that were used by folks like soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore to demonstrate how dire the man-made global warming issue is?

Well, ABC television in Australia, on a show called “Media Watch,” recently debunked the entire issue (video available here, h/t NB member dscott).

It turns out — as NewBuster Jake Gontesky reported on March 20 — the picture was taken in August, “when every year the fringes of the Arctic ice cap melt regardless of the wider effects of global warming.”

The photographer, Australian marine biology student Amanda Byrd, didn’t think the bears were in any jeopardy:

Gateway Pundit adds the following:

Polar bear numbers in Canada have increased in 11 of 13 regions in recent years.
Another report shows that polar bear encounters on the North Slope oil fields have risen to record levels the last two years. The global warming religionists blame the increase in polar bear sightings on shrinking ice flows. So, now the alarmists are blaming manmade global warming on both increased and decreased polar bear populations.
There are 5 times as many polar bears today as there were 50 years ago:

But I guess none of that evidence stopped 8 Republicans from voting in favor of the Cap and Trade bill last Friday. Voted on nearly sight unseen of course as this has become business as usual with legislation under Obama/Pelosi/Reid.

Would this bill cover healthcare for your secretary if she is underwater? Just wondering. Maybe Arlen Specter can make the claim that had this bill been passed in 1969 then Mary Jo Kopechne would be alive today.

Myway news covers the legislation here.

WASHINGTON (AP) – Employers would be required to offer health care to employees or pay a penalty – and all Americans would be guaranteed health insurance – under a draft bill circulated Friday by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s health committee.

The bill would provide subsidies to help poor people pay for care, guarantee patients the right to select any doctor they want and require everyone to purchase insurance, with exceptions for those who can’t afford to.

Insurers would be supposed to offer a basic level of care and would be required to cover all comers, without turning people away because of pre-existing conditions or other reasons. Insurance companies’ profits would be limited, and private companies would have to compete with a new public “affordable access” plan that would for the first time offer government-sponsored health care to Americans not eligible for Medicare, Medicaid or other programs.

Setting the train wreck that surrounds this senator and his legislation aside – is he trying to sink the rest of the economy? This isn’t hard math. Healthcare for a small business costs at least $400 per employee. That is of course is if the employee has no dependents to cover on their policy.

A quick back of the napkin calculation show us that the average small/micro business owner would start laying off employees. If you have 10 employees then Kennedy’s bill would cost $4,000 per month. That’s money straight out of the owners pocket.

I know several small business owners and losing $4,000/month in a down economy means either laying off people or trying to live off of no income. Those are the real life choices that the non-wealthy Washington insiders will have to make. That is of course unless we are elected to the Senate where the government picks up the tab for our employees healthcare and doesn’t notice when you leave one in the bottom of a tidal channel.

www.thepoliticalclass.com