LUR notes that with 14.7 million union members nation wide, that is a “substantial amount of dues money flowing to unions.” It is, indeed.

Before we get to LUR’s calculations, though, we should note that most dues money goes to fund the excessive lifestyles of union bosses who routinely make well over $200,000 a year, dues go to shore up the bloated staffs of union offices, and let us not forget that millions go into the pockets of compliant Democrat politicians to help them get elected over and over again. Many millions more go to create political issue advocacy efforts, like moves to raise our taxes so that union members can get even more of our tax money.

Now let’s take a look at LUR’s calculations:

If we were to use a conservative figure of $50 per month for union dues, in 2010, unions collected $735,000,000 per month in union dues from America’s unionized workers. Multiply $735,000,000 by 12 months and you get a whopping $8,820,000,000 that was collected in union dues in 2010.

That is a lot of cash, indeed. Now let’s see what could have been done with all that money:

Divide $8,820,000,000 by $33,227 and you’ll find that if unions did not take union dues from workers in 2010, 265,447 workers’ jobs could have been supported.

But don’t forget, government union bosses think you are selfish for not wanting to give them millions to allow their members to retire in their fifties (unlike the rest of us), to have better healthcare than the rest of us, and to have generous pensions that we have to pay for through our taxes.

Still, it is interesting how unions want to point to the salaries of industry executives claiming they are somehow illicit yet the dues they’ve stolen from millions of workers could pay the salaries of so many thousands of Americans who are now out of work.

Which is excessive again? The salaries of people actually creating wealth and job or those simply stealing it for union thuggery?

Most of what Mr. Emanuel had to say was your normal, average, everyday puffery that a junior member of a team says when he is leaving his position. Emanuel’s thanks-for-the-memories address was all perfectly innocuous… except for one thing.

Early in his remarks Emanuel issued some hortatory for his boss, President Obama. “I want to thank you for being the toughest leader any country can ask for in the toughest times any country has ever faced,” Emanuel said.

Now, some may think that this is just glad-handing of the sort that one might expect of an underling leaving his beloved boss. But this is far more revealing than that.

Just think of what Emanuel said, here. He claimed that his president has led through the “toughest times any country has ever faced.” Tougher than the Revolution when we weren’t even sure we’d make it as a nation? Tougher than what Madison faced in the War of 1812 when the White House was nearly burnt to the ground? Tougher than the Civil War that Lincoln faced? Tougher than WWI, the Great Depression, WWII?

Worse, those historical episodes I mention were only America’s tough times. Emanuel said that we are in the worst any country ever faced. ANY country? Worse than the utter collapse of the Soviet Union? Good or bad that the U.S.S.R. collapsed, having a country collapse isn’t an easy time? Worse than the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire whose death began the turmoil of WWI? Worse even than the wholesale destruction and death caused by the 2010 earthquake in Haiti in which some 92,000 Haitians were killed? Come on, Rahm. You are making yourself look foolish.

But this is how these historically illiterate Democrats of our modern era really think of these times in which we live. They hyperbolically and ridiculously feel that today, this era, is worse than any era America or any other nation has ever seen. It is an arrogance of imagining they are the center of the universe. This is the arrogance of today’s Democrats placing themselves above history and all of humanity.

Now there is no doubt that America is in bad shape today. Much of that is due to the Democrat’s own misguided efforts, too. But partisan politics aside, it is flat out absurd to say that today’s crisis is worse than previous crises under Washington, Madison, Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR or the trials and travails of some of history’s other great upheavals in other lands. Only the supreme arrogance of the left — or the foolishness of the historically ignorant — would imagine that today is worse than ever.

My bet is on their arrogance.

Finally, wasn’t it Rahm Emanuel who was so gleeful to have a crisis that he wouldn’t “let go to waste”? As my friend Lorie Byrd said to me via email, “Emanuel should have been thrilled if these were truly the ‘toughest times.’ Hey, and just how many times is it appropriate to go on vacation (or to go golfing) in the toughest times in the history of the country?”

I guess things haven’t been so awful as to prevent Obama from golfing, eh?

Unfortunately it is almost impossible for the average citizen to track where the budget money is going in any particular city budget. As we learned from Bell, California people have even been duped into making city politicians millionaires and millions have been misspent.

Cities shift funds from one department to another with such regularity that tracking it is difficult. If the City of Bell is any lesson we need far more transparency in city budgeting.

But it shouldn’t be any surprise to the city fathers of LA that the Staples Center will never pay for itself. After all, the Convention Center has lost millions every year, too, and now they intend to tear down part of that losing venture to build yet another losing venture. According to the L.A. Almanac, in 2005 the convention center brought in $9,130,000. Appropriations for the convention center, however, were 21,608,518. That is an operating loss.

Even if LA wanted to ignore the constant operating loss of its own convention center, they have but to ask San Francisco whose own Moscone Center also operates at a perpetual loss. The Moscone Center takes in about $10 million annually yet has an operating cost that runs at least three million more than it takes in.

LA’s administration expects people to continue to patronize the convention center choking on the construction dust and stumbling over debris, finding little parking and confronted with constant crime in the area, as supporters build a new stadium that itself will not likely end up paying for itself.

Already news has leaked that the cost of this stadium will be over $1 billion. But even that price tag is likely two or even three times too small. After all, even if the stadium “only” costs $1 billion won’t the city have to end up replacing the square footage lost to the convention center?

Also if the city does not replace the square footage, another problem arises. The larger conventions, those that bring in the most money, will have to be canceled because the city has lost the floor space that the convention center originally had. Some that are already booked may have to be canceled and the city will be at a competitive disadvantage with other convention center across the country for future events. This all constitutes a hidden cost to the taxpayers later on.

This is all a familiar tune being played out across the country. It isn’t a new thing, either. Most people are familiar with the famous Houston Astrodome that now sits empty and unused because the city lost its national sports franchises. The stadium was built with much fanfare in 1965 and at this time far removed from its initial construction, one would assume the thing was paid for long ago. But that would be a false assumption.

As Steve Malenga reveals to us:

Take Houston. The Astrodome… There’s still $32 million in debt on a stadium originally constructed for just $35 million, thanks to some $60 million in obligations floated on the dome in the 1980s for upgrades. With no current revenues, the dome must be supported entirely by local taxes, which cover about $2.4 million in annual debt payments (which stretch for 22 years) and another $2 million in upkeep. The solution? More debt, of course. The Harris County Commissioners, who control the stadium, are looking at a plan to turn the whole place into a giant conference and meeting center, at a cost of $900 million in new debt. Either that or spend $128 million to tear the place down.

Malenga also notes similar losses in other cities. Giants Stadium in the Meadowlands, for instance, is still costing the taxpayers millions even after the complex was torn down. Further the Seattle Kingdome offers similar deficits, upwards to $100 million, to Seattle’s taxpayers and Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburg is also in hock for $23 million, or rather the taxpayers are in hock for that obscene amount.

As we can see, even as bodies of government are tearing down stadiums and convention centers and/or proposing new construction, debt service on these and other “abandoned” stadiums (like those built all over for the Olympics) are still saddling the taxpayers with debt. It’s the worst of all worlds as taxpayers are left holding the bag for stadiums that are already not producing revenue they are forced to pay for it all ad infinitum.

Yet LA’s politicians continue to stumble toward this never ending waste of the taxpayer’s money.

The NY GOP made a huge mistake with this smoke-filled-room choice. Scozzafava has made a hash of this campaign and should withdraw her candidacy immediately and allow Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman to take her place.

Her lousy campaign aside, the prime reason we want to Dump Dede is because she doesn’t seem to be much of a Republican in a District that could elect a Republican candidate (and traditionally has). Scozzafava has all the wrong positions for a Republican. She is an abortion supporter, supports same-sex marriage and her hubby is a bigtime union leader. Even worse, groups associated with the criminal, left-wing organization ACORN have endorsed her candidacy — not the sort of company a Republican should keep.

Her primary opponent is New York Conservative Party Candidate Doug Hoffman who is most certainly far more like a Republican than Dede. Hoffman has picked up the support of several high profile Republicans such as former GOP Sen. Fred Thompson, Campaign for Working Families founder Gary Bauer, and the Washington D.C. based Club for Growth. It also looks like Former Congressman Dick Armey is coming out for Hoffman, too.

Hoffman is a small government supporter he is against raising taxes and opposes both the stimulus and Obamacare. Hoffman’s message suits the mood of a tea party going nation that is sick of insider politics and big spending liberals.

As I mentioned, Scozzafava is proving an inept candidate. One of the absurd incidents of this campaign happened this week when Dede’s Hubby called the cops on a correspondent from the conservative magazine Weekly Standard. Apparently the candidate did not appreciate writer John McCormack’s questions and decided that his efforts to get the candidate to answer them constituted “harassment.”

The Scozzafavas claimed that McCormack “repeatedly screamed questions” and carried on in a manner “that would make the National Enquirer blush.” Of course, audio of the incident shows that McCormack was only speaking at a level loud enough to be heard and otherwise carried himself in a professional manner. The police even said that the incident was overblown.

“I don’t believe it ever escalated to anything that would ever be classified as an emergency,” (Lowville Village Police Chief Eric) Fredenburg said.

Strangely, this has become a hill that Newt Gingrich has decided to die on. He insists that only Scozzafava can win in this District and is standing behind his quixotic backing of the liberal Republican.

Gingrich says that he believes Scozzafava when she says that she won’t vote for more taxes and he claims that she came out against Obamacare. But a look at what Scozzafava actually said about Obamacare shows less outright opposition to Obamacare and more calculated dancing around the question. In a recent news report, Scozzafava said:

Any meaningful health care reform must reduce costs by expanding competition across state lines and by implementing much needed tort reform to curb the frivolous lawsuits that have been driving up costs on the entire system.

Where in that artful dodge did Gingrich see actual opposition to Obamacare? As for Hoffman he was unequivocal, saying, “(T)his legislation is not about health care reform. It is simply about loading down the taxpayers with more debt and more costs.”

The main question here is can Hoffman beat the Democrat to win this District? For sure he cannot if Scozzafava stays in the race (and she can’t win if Hoffman does). Still even Washington Post writer Chris Cillizza — NO Republican supporter he — thinks Hoffman can win.

Ominously for a GOP win, Scozzafava has already faded to third place in the polls despite being the official GOP nominee and she is out of steam in fund raising while Hoffman has surged with his.

Lastly, I’d like to comment on the selection process by which New York Republicans pick their candidates. We are in a day when few people of any political ideology trust those in power and party loyalty is at an all time low. To regain the confidence of the people the GOP should be initiating a process of getting back to the people and trusting the rank and file to become an integral part of the party. Yet the NY GOP goes behind closed doors and chooses the candidates for the voters? This smacks of cronyism and the good ol’ boy network. To essentially tell the voters, as this selection process does, that their opinion isn’t wanted is precisely the wrong message to send.

Today I join a whole retinue of conservative bloggers and writers to say let the voters choose. Dump DeDe. Vote Doug Hoffman.

Simply put, due to my own personal times constraints, I simply cannot keep up on the goings on in Washington in the fresh and timely manner demanded by this conservative blog of record. RedState will continue to be an important stop for those that need to know of the daily business in D.C. and will also continue to serve as the one place where conservatives and Republicans can go to find out how to become involved.

I want to thank the many RedState readers that have emailed me over the years with their kind words about my past work here and I want you to know that I appreciate your encouragement. I also want to thank the many comments that have been left on my RedState diaries. You have all been wonderful and I am humbled. I leave you all with the archives as a fond memory.

Also, I want to thank the many RedState front page contributors that made me feel so welcome. You guys are a heck of a bunch.

I will, of course, continue to write for my own blog and the several other blogs for which I work. I’m not leaving the blogosphere, for sure. I will also drop an occasional diary here when I can. I just won’t be front paging any more.

Thanks again and please do follow me on PubliusForum.com, my own personal blog.

Yours in service,

Warner Todd Huston

Does that seem like a hyperbolic statement to you? At first blush, it might. But a considered look at the direction in which we are quickly heading will prove that, compared to the British Parliament that raised the ire of our forefathers so long ago, today’s Congress shows many signs of the same, oppressive, haughty, disinterested politicians that considered their national government more important than the local’s interests and needs.

Representation is the key word, here. What does it mean? What did it mean then? Of course, the problem was that it meant two different things to the opposing sides of the Revolutionary era, hence the conflict. In England, representation meant that Parliament “represented” the whole of the country and that each member of that body was elected from their home to go forth and become a member of the whole. British politicians generally did not imagine that they were representing their hometown when they went to Parliament.

As an example of the basic assumption of Parliamentary representation, a pamphlet published in 1765 in London asserted that, “every Member of Parliament sits in the House not as a representative of his own constituents but as one of that august assembly by which all the commons of Great Briton are represented.” (“The Regulations Lately Made Concerning the Colonies and the Taxes Imposed Upon Them, Considered,” by Thomas Whately)

On the other side of the Atlantic, however, the American political system had evolved in the opposite direction. The distance between colonies, the fact that they didn’t all meet together and each represented distinct and separate proto-states, this tended to propel the colonial political scene toward local interests and control. Consequently, when someone was sent to any political office in the colonies, it was expected that he would represent those that sent him, not the greater body into which he entered. Local interests were premier.

Consequently, when it came time for Parliament to consider tax policies to be imposed on the colonists (the Paper Tax, Tea Tax, Towshend Duties, et al), there was no expectation among them that the colonists themselves needed any members of their own sitting in Parliament to represent their fellows. Parliament itself was considered the proper representation of all Great Briton’s possessions regardless of what individuals sat there.

The colonists, however, were quite upset that their own people had no voice in the national body and were incensed that taxes descended upon them without their ascent to the policy. Parliament seemed haughty, disinterested, unconnected and unconcerned with the colonist’s needs and desires and Americans felt as if enslaved to far off masters that never asked for as much as a by your leave. The people and the government seemed in no way connected to the colonists.

Now, doesn’t that sound like Congress today?

Of course, this is not to say that Congress is in every way a far off body of disinterested masters haughtily unconcerned with the voices back home. But who cannot see that it is becoming more like that every day?

Repeatedly, for instance, we find Congressmen and Senators suddenly adopting the national party line and doing a 180 from previous positions — the ones that got them elected — or succumbing to giant piles of cash from interests outside the state that elected them. Remember Al Gore, the staunchly anti-abortion politician from Tennessee that suddenly became a Roe fan once he entered Congress and decided he had national political ambitions? Even this year we saw Senator Gillibrand from New York do an instantaneous about face on the Second Amendment once she entered the Senate. She was well known as pro-Second Amendment and then she got appointed to the Senate and, voila, she’s suddenly anti-Second Amendment. Additionally, Republicans in Illinois just discovered that Congressman Mark Kirk is a proponent of Cap and Trade proving himself amenable to destroying the entire energy industry and laying an oppressive tax on every American despite what they might want. Why did he do it? Because he got money from the enviro-wacko lobby from outside his state and decided to give them his vote instead of the people of Illinois, that’s why. It was a simple, unprincipled dash for the cash.

Increasingly nationally focused Non-Governmental Organizations are gathering large sums of money to influence Congressmen to their cause whether the people back home care about the lobbyist’s issue or not and this is not to mention the increasingly demanding control of the national party establishment forcing Congressmen to spout the party line often times in contravention to what those at home support.

There are many reasons for this. The 17th Amendment, for instance, dangerously detached members of the Senate from local control by making them beasts of the party and elected by “the people,” instead of sent by the states to represent state interests. And there is the increasing cost of running for election. Any more, only the ultra rich can run a campaign without having to worry if the national party will support them financially — and that support is often keyed toward whether or not the candidate assumes the party line.

As it happens, the voice of the folks back home is receding farther and farther into the background as members of Congress pay increasing heed to national issues, donors outside their state, and party doctrine instead of local interests.

How long will it be until Congressmen will firmly decide that they represent “The United States” instead of the individual States there from? In fact, Congress is already far down that road toward ignoring the voices back home and deliberating on what they imagine is good for the whole of the country instead of those that sent them to D.C. in the first place.

So, how are they getting away with it? One way is that, while these unconnected, haughty pols make laws they deem it in their political interests to pass, they hide behind baubles and pork sent home in an insincere attempt to make it seem as if they are “doing something” for the folks back home.

Still, our voices from home can force a Congressman to change course. But it takes the collective outrage of the people back home to force that course correction because all too often it seems as if Congress is intent on its own agenda with no mind to what the little people back home might want. Instead of going to Congress with their constituents first and foremost in their minds, the people are an afterthought as the national agenda is pursued.

Congress may not quite yet be a perfect emulation of the Parliament that taxed American colonists without including them in on the decision making process, but how much longer will it be until that hubris is revisited on the people of this nation?

We should not entirely despair, of course. The true system that the founders created is still there underneath all the garbage that later generations piled on top of it. It will take dedication of the citizens to hold their representatives accountable to return this system to a more pure one, but more than that it will take education. As Ben Franklin is reputed to have said to a woman wondering what the founder had wrought, we have a Republic “if we can keep it.” That takes educating ourselves on the issues as well as just how our government is supposed to work.

All is not lost, to be sure. But with the poor education we are now offering our youth, it cannot be much longer before no one has the slightest clue what it was that the founders created and just why it is special enough not to let slip through our fingers.

We conservatives serve as the stopgap to the degradation of our country. Liberals and the uneducated see no reason not to rush headlong to wholesale destruction of what the United States “is.” They just don’t care a whit about what we are. Like Buckley said, it is our duty to stand athwart their path and yell STOP. But our duty is not just to be bellicose. Ours is to educate and keep this country on the straight and narrow and one of those duties involves holding our representatives accountable within the American system. We can fix it, if we have the fortitude. The alternative is to lose the world’s greatest nation and to see our great experiment end in failure and that is just what the left wants.

Pelosi rushed the climate bill through without giving her own members time to read the bill and come to understand it. The result was a vote that has gotten moderates beaten up pretty well by constituents that were never given an opportunity to voice their opinions before their representatives voted.

Since the climate bill, moderates are “once bitten” on rushing to vote on an issue before they’ve had a chance to digest the thing and bring it back home to get a feel from their voters as to which way they should go. With that experience, they don’t want to rush into healthcare in the same way they did the climate bill that has caused so many of them so much heartburn.

What this all means, folks, is that even Democrats are starting to feel the heat over the gigantic price tag of this healthcare boondoggle as well as the other horrible aspects of this bill. So even if you have Democrat representatives you have the opportunity to voice your opposition to this nationalization of nearly 29% of our economy.

Call your representative and tell them you don’t want government rationing, government mandates, doctors eliminated from decision making, and crushing taxes raised to pay for this foolishness. There is still time to knock this deal down.

(Cross posted at HealthcareHorseRace.com)

The card check feature would have allowed unions to eliminate the ages old democratic practice of allowing prospective union employees the benefit of a secret ballot to vote “yes” or “no” for organizing their work place.

Removal of this feature of the EFCA proves that our Senators can be moved by pressure from constituents. But, let’s not imagine that the war is now won. This one small victory still leaves a bill jammed full of anti-business, economy killing aspects and we need to keep the pressure on to kill this mess.

The card check feature is nothing compared to the forced arbitration aspect of the bill, so we still have work to do.

But even this victory is not a sure thing. As Service Employees International Union President Andy Stern says, it could go right back in later.

As we have said from day one, majority sign-up is the best way for workers to have the right to choose a voice at their workplace. The Employee Free Choice Act is going through the usual legislative process, and we expect a vote on a majority sign-up provision in the final bill or by amendment in both houses of Congress.

In other words, Stern thinks that once the bill gets to the reconciliation phase where the Senate version and the version from the House of Representatives come together, they will slip that card check feature right back in when they think no one is looking.

That’s the underhandedness of Congress, folks. Nothing is ever a victory won. The forces of good must fight those Democratic Party forces of darkness every day.

So, let’s keep the pressure on those Congressmen. This bill is bad for workers, bad for business, and bad for government. Let’s keep working to kill it.

What is curious with this piece is the fact that Tumulty seems oblivious to the possibility that if healthcare is failing to win the day, that failure could be squarely laid at the president’s feet. After all, it is his campaign promise and his “highest priority” that we tackle healthcare. Yet Tumulty, while mildly scolding Obama for not being hands on enough, is all too willing to blame everyone but Obama for the floundering of the debate.

Tumulty sees all the “special interests” as muddying the waters while praising Obama’s initial hands off style on guiding lawmakers. “Until quite recently,” Tumulty says, “that flexible approach appeared to be working pretty well. Congressional chairmen usually prefer having control to being told what to do by the White House.”

Her last bit is true because the simple fact is that presidents don’t write legislation, Congress does. Presidents can only suggest and arm twist. But they don’t write legislation.

Still, she is worried that things are bogging down.

But new fault lines are opening up everywhere you look. Liberals are worried that Obama is going squishy on including a strong, government-run “public option” among the health-care choices available to Americans. Conservatives are warning that the legislation won’t do enough to control health costs. Rural lawmakers are complaining that proposed Medicare cuts will fall too hard on their states. The two sides of the abortion debate are tussling over whether the procedure should be covered under the plan. And those are just the arguments going on among Democrats.

“It’s all a sign that the season for hard decisions has arrived,” Tumulty gravely warns. What she says next is revealing.

The next hurdle is to get a bill through the House and Senate by the time Congress adjourns for its August break. White House officials concede that missing that deadline could throw the entire exercise off track, because it would give opponents a month to undermine it. Says one: “If we don’t get it done before the August recess, it will be subject to a lot of attack” when lawmakers are home among their constituents.

Gee, why would Congressmen be so afraid to hear from their constituents, eh? Is it because the lowly people might not approve of Obama’s plans to steal away nearly 20% of the nation’s economy and place it under government control? Yeah, why would Congress want to hear that?

Regardless, Tumulty wants Obama to take a strong hand and make it all happen despite that those lowly voters might disapprove.

If the President wants to accelerate the process, he may have to abandon his original hands-off strategy and start getting more deeply involved.

Tumulty is still worried, though, that the whole healthcare deal could fall through. Her last line seems to reveal her worst fears here.

The question is, Will there be health-care reform at the end of it?

No wonder she is urging the president to hurry up and get more involved. Don’t want a good emergency going to waste and all.

A last point: another curious thing about this is that Tumulty has had to let slip the Old Media meme that Obama is the man in charge. In order to cajole a government take over of healthcare — apparently her personal desire — she’s had to admit that Obama has spent his entire short time as president making pronouncements one after the other yet leaving the actual work to be done by everyone else. Obama has not himself gotten directly involved in much of anything since taking the oath. He moves from one grand announcement to the next without actually doing much groundwork to assure that what he is pronouncing is ready to hit the ground running.

Tumulty seems torn in this piece. Can she blame Obama for not “being there”? Can she scold him for not being hands on enough when he is supposed to be the most energetic president since FDR? Yet, she badly wants healthcare reform and to do so she has to wrestle with Obama’s failure thus far to force it down our throats.

Poor girl. She’s in a dilemma, for sure.

(Photo credit: pbs.org)

Yes, the Senate is raining QAHCAA down upon us with its healthcare bill. Soon we’ll be knee deep in QAHCAA. QAHCAA will be coming out our ears. The whole thing is a pile of QAHCAA. The Senate has jammed 10 pounds of QAHCAA into a 5 pound bag. We are all in deep QAHCAA.

Nice going Democrats. That is one fine acronym for your bill. Very fitting. Right on. Props to what ever half-witted staffer you let come up with that one!

(H/T P.J. Gladnick of Newsbusters.org)

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday that Democrats could use a proposed new tax on the wealthy to pay down the deficit, if there’s money left over after funding healthcare reform.

But, the CBO is claiming that Obamacare will cost in excess of $1 trillion and the surtax is “only” going to raise $544 billion. How, exactly, is there supposed to be anything “left over” after Obamacare is “paid for.”

I know, I just used a lot of quote marks, but they are deservedly derisory.

The surtax will not “pay for” Obamacare because the projected costs (projections that are surely too low) are higher than what the surtax is projected to bring in. There just won’t be anything “left over.” Nor can Obamacare BE paid for. It will continue to grow wildly once passed and will never be paid for by any measure. Healthcare will become just another unfunded mandate like it has become in Massachusetts. Lastly, my quotes around “only” above is to scoff at what Washington thinks is such a tiny amount. Why, it’s only $544 billion, don’t you know? A few billion here, a few billion there… pretty soon we’re talking about real money (pardon my Dirksenism).

But here is this silly excuse for a Speaker dreaming about all the wonderful things that she can do with the surtax receipts. She reminds me of what happens when you give a 10-year-old a $20 bill. If you ask them what they’re going to do with the $20, they invariably say they are going to get all the candy they want, a passel full of new toys and a pony. They simply haven’t the mental capacity to understand how far a mere $20 will go.

This is a perfect way to describe this Pelosi claim. She’s intellectually incapable of understanding the amount of money we are talking about here. In her mind the surtax will pay for healthcare, pay down a trillion dollar deficit… and there will probably be enough left over to get her some candy and a pony.

Snowe has recently begun to say that a vote on the bill before the August recess, as Obama keeps pushing for, is way too soon and that the Senate needs to slow down considerably.

“We shouldn’t be restrained by an artificially compressed timeline,” said the Maine moderate, pointing out that with estimated costs of $2.4 trillion, health care comprises 17% of the US gross domestic product, so reforming health care is a “Herculean challenge.”

“It’s important to us to take time to work through these issues,” Snowe said.

As with all Republicans, Snowe is wary of the so-called public option aspect of the Democrat’s plan, that part where the government will “compete” with the insurance industry for clients.

Many are saying that the public option is a deal killer and even the White House is acting as if it is softening on it despite that the President keeps claiming it is an important aspect of the plan.

Meanwhile, a McClatchy article was recently published that seems to show that the American public is losing its faith in the healthcare plans of the president and his party.
In Americans split on health care as Obama’s approval sinks, McClatchy shows that the country is closely split on the issue.

The poll shows that “there is no broad agreement” on how Obama should tackle the reform of healthcare. This appears to be troubling news for a Congress that expected smooth sailing for the healthcare reforms proposed by a popular president.

People are not expressing an overwhelming sense that the federal government can be trusted to fix the healthcare system. And the more they learn about the plans being floated by Congress the less they like them.

Americans are especially against the funding schemes that have been offered to pay for healthcare reform thus far.

(Cross posted at HealthcareHorseRace.com.)

Was there a Richard Brookhiser in attendance or a Larry Schweikart? Was there someone like Forrest McDonald at Obama’s secret dinner? Nope. Except for one attendee, the invited historians have all used their status as historians to make all sorts of ahistorical proclamations about modern politics which is quite un-historian-like of them.

The fact is, no real historian would comment as an expert on contemporary events. A real historian knows that it takes decades of time to go by before history can be written. It takes decades for records to become available, generations of biographies and autobiographies need to be written and much time must pass before actions made in one decade can bear their ultimate fruit. All this information has to be reviewed and weighed before history can be written and very often the words of participants cannot be taken for gospel. Any real historian will know that commenting on contemporary events can only be opinion and guesswork not FACT.

But that is not the stripe of “historians” that Obama invited to the White House, the sort that wait for due time to pass so that the proper research can be done to determine what really happened in a given era. No, what Obama sought out were activists that pretend at the historian’s art.

So what lefty “historians” were invited to the super-secret dinner? Here’s a list.

Michael Beschloss – Mostly a slavish John Kennedy aficionado, Beschloss once wrote a ridiculous piece in 1993 for The New York Times in which he predicted that the Republican Party would engage in all manner of extremist behaviors once President Clinton and “President” Al Gore left office. It featured an ex-president George H.W. Bush being lambasted by history as a troubled president dogged by his “pardoning of Casper Weinberger.”

Douglas Brinkley – Is well known as the hack writer that belched out a wholly uncritical take on John F. Kerry’s life during the Senator’s doomed run for the White House against George W. Bush in. The book was little else but a sunny campaign hagiography that was worthless as a work of history. Before that, Brinkley prostituted himself all over TV as the chief mourner for John Kennedy, Jr. when he flew himself to his death in 1999. Brinkley’s over-the-top celebration of Kennedy and his ubiquity on TV during those days we so bad that Kennedy’s George Magazine even removed him from their masthead as a contributor. Brinkley was so ridiculous that even the lefty Slate.com said, “Even amid this week’s staggering hyperbole, Brinkley’s emotional profligacy has distinguished him.”

Doris Kearns Goodwin – The “woman” of the bunch, Goodwin is another Kennedy sycophant. Goodwin also has tackled Lincoln and LBJ. She was seen all over TV during the last few presidential elections punditizing for Democrats. She has also been caught in a few embarrassing plagiarism scandals where she was caught lifting work from others. Why this literary thief keeps getting praise as a premiere historian is beyond logic. But she is good for the left party line, so I guess that is all the qualifications she needs to stay the darling of the Old Media.

Garry Wills – This guy is a truly devoted lefty. Wills long ago went from being a mere historian to being an activist that uses his reputation as cover for his activism pretending that he knows better than anyone else because he knows some history. He has written castigating the Catholic Church for its stance on abortion, he excoriated the Bush administration proclaiming that Bush had somehow become a theocrat, and he has been outspoken in many other contemporary political fights. One of the worst works of history I ever read was by this hack. “Negro President” was supposed to explain why Thomas Jefferson was elected because of the three-fifths clause in the Constitution. But, after reading the thankfully short thing one will quickly realize that Wills never addresses his own point and doesn’t prove a thing to settle the thesis. It is truly a horrible book.

Robert Dallek – Dallek never met a Kennedy or Roosevelt he didn’t revere and hasn’t found much of interest in any Republican to write about… except, unsurprisingly, Nixon and then only because he hates him so much. Dallek signed his name to a letter of support for Obama back in 2007 during the late campaign and wrote a piece for The New York Daily News that said that Obama’s lack of experience didn’t matter and we should elect him anyway.

Robert Caro – Chiefly known for his multi-volume bio of Lyndon Johnson but he also wrote that George W. Bush was a “dangerous” president. He also has praised the socialist, mess that is the Great Society as LBJs “great achievement.”

H. W. Brands – Brands also wrote disparagingly of the Bush years while IN the Bush years. He is also a proponent of big government taxes, high spending and Barack Obama. Like many of his leftist ilk, he was sure that we had lost the Iraq war.

Kenneth Mack – Mack is a “race identity” guy, whatever that is supposed to mean. I suppose that Mack was Obama’s token black historian at this dinner because he is not even close to the league the others are playing in. I guess it didn’t hurt that Mack supported Obama heavily during the campaign.

David M. Kennedy – OK, I don’t have as much trouble with Kennedy. So, I haven’t too much to say negative about him.

In short, nearly every last one of these historians violate the very core of an historian’s art; research. They have all made pronouncements with the color of “fact” about current events when they each know darn well that the “truth” of what will become history cannot be known for a long time after events are set in motion. They may be rightly celebrated for their work on the past. But their biased notions of what IS now can and should be discounted as mere opinion and should not be given the color of “history” merely from the fact that those that claim to be historians are involved in the saying of it.

In the end, when each of their biased notions is reviewed, a simple liberal perspective is revealed. And if they were real historians, they’d know modern liberalism is a failed notion in and of itself. Historians or no, it seems they are true believers and fellow travelers all.

This time it is the “partisan divide” in the healthcare debate. The Times tsks Republicans for solidly lining up to oppose Obama’s wild grab for nearly 20 percent of the nation’s economy through his healthcare plans. Yet not once does the Times mention the many areas in which Democrats are disagreeing with Democrats on Obamacare. The Times makes it seem as if there is no dissent among Democrats and it is only those meanie Republicans holding up the wonderfulness of Obamacare.

The Times starts out with a headline that focuses on partisan obstruction: “Health Care Vote Illustrates Stubborn Partisan Divide.”

The story then goes on to talk of how Republicans in the Senate are standing against Obamacre. This is true, of course. Senate Republicans are standing fairly strong against Obamacare at this moment. But, the story is told as if this is all there is to it. The headline, for instance, seems to state as fact that healthcare is only being held up by a “partisan divide.” But the truth is there are many Democrat voices expressing worry over Obamacare, too.

The most outspoken group of Democrats nay saying the current debate is the Blue Dog Democrats in the House of Representatives. Last week these 40 Democrats sent a letter to Speaker of the House Pelosi saying that they could not support the House leadership’s healthcare bill unless major changes were made.

Not only that, but even a Big Labor bigwig expressed his lack of support for a part of the Democrat’s healthcare agenda with the idea of taxing healthcare benefits. Teamsters President James P. Hoffa recently warned Democrats that if they tired to tax employee’s healthcare benefits, he’d turn against them.

These are but two examples of many, not that the Times mentions any of this.

The point here is, the sea is not smooth as glass on the Democrat side for healthcare as it might seem if The New York Times is your only source on the facts.

Lastly, I’d like to point out one more nice little example of a bias in rhetoric employed by the Times in this story.

The bill, which aims to make health insurance available to all Americans…

The thing is, insurance is already available to all Americans. Just pony up the cash and it’s yours.

Anyway, the biggest problem with this NYT story is how incomplete it is. One gets the vague notion that the only opposition to healthcare is coming from recalcitrant Republicans. The truth is, though, there are deepening disagreements coming from both parties about the efficacy of healthcare “reform” emanating from the Democratic leadership and President Obama.

This is the nation’s most revered cemetery yet some soldier’s names are lost to the permanent record, some burials are unknown because of failed record keeping, it is even thought that some headstones are on the wrong graves.

In 2004 and 2005, Arlington conducted a pilot project to check burial records against headstone information on 300 graves. “The accuracy of interment records and maps that track reserved, obstructed, and occupied graves were proven to have errors,” the project found, according to Arlington National Cemetery budget documents. “For example, gravesites that were marked as obstructed were actually available and information listed on grave cards and burial records were not consistent with the information on the actual headstone.”

The problems continue today. In 2008, Arlington National Cemetery issued a progress report to Congress on the computerization project. “The current way of doing business is mostly manual, complex, redundant and inefficient,” cemetery officials noted, acknowledging continuing discrepancies among burial maps, headstones and burial records.

One would think that in this electronic age, all those records would have been computerized years ago. Apparently there was a program launched almost 10 years ago to do just that but it has gotten nowhere and still to this day records are being kept in ink on paper.

And, while the cemetery is failing at its modernization of records there is silliness being perpetrated by the man in charge on the grounds, too. He is breaking into employee’s email addresses, sending messages and impersonating the employee, mining hard drives for “information,” and all sorts of nonsense that has nothing to do with his job.

Deputy Superintendent Thurman Higginbotham, the man responsible for the invasion of email accounts and what not, seems to be a paranoid sort imagining the world is out to get him. But whatever his personality, it appears that he is failing to properly care for our sacred fallen.

Despite many thousands of dollars sent his way to identify, record, and compile the information of those American heroes that are interred at Arlington National Cemetery, this government flunky has failed to deliver.

And the government, even as it is aware of these problems, has done nothing. Not only that, but there seem to be no plans to do anything about it either.

The upshot is, the government has failed our dead. They cannot keep records straight on people that have been buried at Arlington. They have lost information on people that have been buried in the ground. The system is a disaster, a failure, a total mess.

So, if the government can’t even do right by the dead… how can we expect it to do right by the living in a national healthcare system?

As the Boston Globe reports, added to the bill is “billions of dollars for walking paths, streetlights, jungle gyms, and even farmers’ markets.” This spending is supposedly to improve the country’s “health infrastructure” – a laughable rhetorical device if there ever was one.

This is, we all know, nothing but par for the course in pork spending by the Congress that Obama claimed would be above such nonsense once he came to rule. Either he lied again, or Congress isn’t paying any attention to the president’s claims.

Oh, but Democrats have an explanation don’t you know? Catch this weak response from Kennedy spokesman Anthony Coley to the question of if this is just pork spending or not:

“If improving the lighting in a playground or clearing a walking path or a bike path or restoring a park are determined as needed by a community to create more opportunities for physical activity, we should not prohibit this from happening.’’

Yeah, and if a Senator wants to add, say, $30 million so that some university can play with a mouse or two, like Speaker of the House Pelosi did with the so-called stimulus bill, why we shouldn’t say a word, I guess?

Just one more example of the fact that the vaunted era of Obama is no different than the tax and spend Democrats of any other time in the modern era.

(Cross posted at HealthcareHorseRace.com)

Not all Democrats want to tread this suicidal path, granted. We’ve discussed the efforts of the 40 self-professed Blue Dogs several times before (Here and here) as last week they sent a letter to Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Stenny Hoyer of the Democratic leadership in the House warning them that they weren’t necessarily on board with the current direction that Democrats in the House were going on healthcare.

One of the items on their list was a concern about small business.

Small Business Protections – Any additional requirements for employers must be carefully considered and done so within the context of what is currently offered. Small business owners and their employees lack coverage because of high and unstable costs – not because of an unwillingness to provide or purchase it. We cannot support a bill that further exacerbates the challenges faced by small businesses.

Thus far the Blue Dogs have been wholly ignored by the Democratic leadership, at least as far as protections for small businesses goes. The current plan being sponsored by the House Democrats puts a crushing tax on small businesses just when we need the rejuvenating power and innovation from small business to rebuild our faltering economy.

So what does the Democrat plan portend for small business? Here are some bullet point facts:

• More than 50% of filers who will pay the Democrat surtax have small business income.
• The Democrat small business surtax has an automatic revenue grab when it doubles itself in 2013.
• The Democrat plan, according to a study by the Tax Foundation, would raise the top tax rate in 24 states to more than 50%.
• According the National Association of Manufactures, an industry hit hard by the economy, 68% of manufactures file as S-corporations with an average income of $570,000, well above the $350,000 base the Democrats have set for the surtax.
• In addition to taxing small business income, the Democratic bill also institutes a payroll tax on small business payrolls. The Democratic bill requires small businesses who do not currently offer health insurance to pay a payroll fine of up to 8% of the their total payroll.
• According to 2006 data from NFIB, businesses with between five and nine workers, representing about one million employers, had an average payroll of around $375,000 a year. A report from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that only about half of firms with three to nine workers offered health benefits in 2008.
• Even if a small business does offer insurance, they are still required to pay a payroll tax if an employee chooses to opt out and enter the government plan.

Now, these are exactly the sort of punishing requirements, regulations and taxes that prevent small business from hiring new workers, expanding when they can, and prevents them from thriving.

We need small business today more than ever to get this moribund economy on the mend. But with Obamacare on the march, we must expect small business to stay depressed and unable to help life this country back to prosperity.

Sure, maybe we’ll have “insurance,” but without jobs to pay the bills, what good will it do us?

(Cross posted at HealthcareHorseRace.com)

Cook is perplexed why Washington pols were “getting an earful” from constituents over the energy tax hikes that the Cap and Trade bill will force on the nation. He just couldn’t figure why adding “only” an additional $175 a year to the average citizen’s electric bill was such a big deal.

Although the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the average household would pay only an additional $175 per year in energy costs, perception is more important than reality. The perception is that this is a huge tax increase at a time when people can ill afford one. Hence, Democrats, whether they supported the bill or not, are getting battered, increasing their blood pressure.

Sure, another nearly $200 a year may not seem so bad… if that was the only tax hike that Barack Obama was proposing to slam the people with. But this is just yet another example of rising taxes that the Obama administration is championing. The tax hike on cigarettes, the end of the Bush tax cuts soon to come, the wild tax plans being floated to fund Obama’s take over of healthcare, all these are piling one on top of the other and voters are scared that soon they won’t be able to make even it day to day. And all this is coming out of Washington during one of the worst economies in decades when people are struggling already!

But to Cook, tax hikes to pass such a supposedly important bill as Cap and Trade should be accepted without question regardless of how it hurts the average citizen. Further, he just can’t see why another nearly $200 a year would hurt people of lower incomes.

The tax hike with Cap and Trade is bad enough, but what should anger Americans most about this bill is not necessarily just the high taxes it will impose on us all. Amazingly, the fact that bills similar to our Cap and Trade bill that passed in New Zealand, Australia, France and other western nations have proven such an economic fiasco that those nations are either eliminating their carbon emissions laws or suspending them. Yet here is Barack Obama pushing the same garbage that other nations are dumping on top of adding to the tax burden for all of us. Can’t he learn from their mistakes?

That isn’t so smart for the smartest president ever, is it?

Last, I find it amazing that Cook even believed the simplistic analysis peddled by the CBO that Cap and Tax will impose “only an additional $175” to American’s tax burden. This may be true strictly with their electric bills, but the additional costs of Cap and Tax do not only affect electric bills. The entire energy industry will be affected and this extra cost incurred will cascade down to every citizen in higher prices on just about everything they buy throughout the year. So, the electric bill prices raised on consumers won’t be the only place that the pain of Cap and Tax will show up in their yearly budgets.

But why should Charlie Cook take much notice of how Washington can hurt the average American? Why struggle to understand how the average American would be a tad upset over rising taxes? It won’t hurt him and his friends and that is all he notices.

A very typical liberal reaction, that.

A very typical liberal reaction, that.

(H/T Brian Faughnan)

You’ll notice that many of them are being requested by “the President.” That would be the Barack Obama 2012 re-election campaign project you are seeing there.

For some reason, my list is causing trouble with the code here, so the full list was posted by Jamie Dupree.

The Article, titled “Where the New Deal Went Badly Wrong,” was written by Harold L. Cole and Lee Ohanian. Harold L. Cole, Ph.D. Economics, University of Rochester, 1986, is a professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania. Lee E. Ohanian, Ph.D. Economics University of Rochester, 1993, is a professor of economics at UCLA.

The pair have noted that the New Deal strengthened unions and gave to them powers for striking that brought industry to its knees just at a time when the country needed as many new jobs as it could get to tug itself out of depression. Unfortunately, the power given unions caused the depression to last far longer than it needed to last.

We have calculated that New Deal labor and industrial policies, which raised wages and prices 20 percent or more in many industrial sectors, were directly responsible for stretching the Depression through the decade of the 1930s. All told, we estimate that these policies kept the economy below the growth rate one would have otherwise expected for an extra seven years.

Additionally:

It’s fair to say, then, that the consequences of New Deal policies are widely misunderstood. Roosevelt’s industrial and labor policies retarded recovery by restricting employment and output in the name of raising profits and wages.

So, the wild demands of unions uncoupled to market forces and with the weight of the government behind them caused untold misery to continue for seven long years, many years longer than it needed to.

Amusingly, the article notes that even Roosevelt came to rue the power he handed the unions and he had to force them to forgo their demands during the war because the war effort was being harmed by union thuggery. He made a monster and it came back to bite him.

Through a discussion of history, the article shows that the mess FDR made is the same one that today’s Employee Free Choice Act will lead us back to. Unions are not interested in what’s right. They are only interested in what they can take regardless of who it hurts or how badly it mars economic recovery. FDR proved that in the 1930s. Barack Obama and the EFCA will prove it today if allowed to become law.