Happy Independence Day Everybody!!!

Have a great one. Enjoy the parades, fireworks and backyard BBQ. Remember, no matter what 0bama is trying to do, we’re still the greatest country in the world.

Yeah, Right

So little Barry wants to “kick some ass”. Little Barry couldn’t kick a soccer ball.

He does excel in kicking the hell out of the taxpayer, though.

The only one happy about 0bama in the White House is Jimmy Carter. Now Carter can say, “Hey, I was only the 2nd worst President”.

Happy Memorial Day

Happy Memorial Day Everyone! This year, about 40 of us celebrated by going to the Janesville Airshow to see the USAF Thunderbirds. They were joined by the Canadian Snowbirds, the Canadian Flight Demo team. I had never seen the Snowbirds but would do it again. Tremendous grace and precision flying with nine planes.

Naturally, the Thunderbirds gave their usual excellent performance. Here’s a few samples for your enjoyment. The rest can be seen on my Flickr page here.

Could Have Been Prevented

Well, the big oil spill in the gulf is still out of control and may equal or surpass the Exxon Valdez. Here’s an update of the damage that will be caused.

Watching the news this morning, I learned that blowout preventers are NOT mandatory on offshore rigs. I really don’t understand that at all. With all the moronic laws that the moronic Congress passes, one would think this type of regulation would be in place. In terms of price, BPs don’t add appreciably to the cost of a new well and if something does happen, like the gulf, the ability to stop the oil from gushing out of the damaged wellhead is something that will prevent the devastation we are seeing now along the Gulf Coast.

Fuck You, Feingold

In the 4/24/10 Wall Street Journal, there was an excellent article about the vote fraud in Wisconsin. You can read it here or read it all below. Any emphasis mine. Let me just say this as a pre-commentary. Russ Feingold is living proof that Harvard Law School is over-rated (see also: Jim “Pol Pot” Doyle”).

By JOHN FUND

Milwaukee

An attempt to hijack the state’s election laws and open the door for voter fraud failed at the last minute this week in Wisconsin’s legislature. But threats to ballot integrity continue in other states, and Congress may rush to pass ill-conceived legislation this year that would only sow confusion and increase the potential for chaos on a national level.

Wisconsin’s story shows how high the stakes are. Late in March, a 72-page bill was suddenly introduced and rushed forward with only abbreviated hearings. The bill would have given “nationally recognized” community organizing groups access to the state driver’s license database to encourage voter turnout. After the infamous registration scandals involving Acorn in 2008, this was clearly a strange priority. Requests for an absentee ballot in a single election would also become permanent (without requiring a legitimate reason, such as infirmity), and the ballots would be automatically mailed out in future elections.

Coercion and chicanery are made much easier by the excessive use of absentee ballots. Most of the elections thrown out by courts—Miami, Florida’s mayoral election in 1998, the East Chicago, Indiana’s mayor’s race in 2005—involved fraudulent absentee votes.

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Associated Press

Voters in Sturtevant, Wis., on primary election day, 2008.
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Three decades ago absentee and early ballots were only 5% of all votes cast nationwide. In 2008, they exceeded 25%. Wisconsin’s bill would also have allowed voters to register on the Internet without supplying a signature—thus removing a valuable protection against identity theft and election fraud.

Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen, a Republican, blasted the bill, saying it would “make election fraud more likely” and “jeopardize the orderly administration of election laws.” In the end, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Russ Decker admitted the bill was being rushed through too quickly and adjourned the session without brining it up for a vote.

Democratic leaders also worried that a popular amendment to require photo ID at the polls would have been attached to their measure. Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle has vetoed three previous photo ID laws, even though Democrats such as state Sen. Tim Carpenter of Milwaukee supported them saying he’s seen “eye opening” public support for the idea.

That backing is based on real evidence. In 2004, John Kerry won Wisconsin over George W. Bush by 11,380 votes out of 2.5 million cast. After allegations of fraud surfaced, the Milwaukee police department’s Special Investigative Unit conducted a probe. Its February 2008 report found that from 4,600 to 5,300 more votes were counted in Milwaukee than the number of voters recorded as having cast ballots. Absentee ballots were cast by people living elsewhere; ineligible felons not only voted but worked at the polls; transient college students cast improper votes; and homeless voters possibly voted more than once.

Much of the problem resulted from Wisconsin’s same-day voter law, which allows anyone to show up at the polls, register and then cast a ballot. ID requirements are minimal. The report found that in 2004 a total of 1,305 “same day” voters were invalid.

The report was largely ignored, and just before the 2008 election the police department’s Special Investigative Unit was ordered by superiors not to send anyone to polling places on Election Day.

In January of this year, Assistant District Attorney Bruce Landgraf, the city prosecutor overseeing election issues, complained that the Milwaukee Police Department was stalling its investigation of voter fraud in the 2008 election. “Sadly, [the prosecution of] several probable cases of genuine voter fraud were harmed by that delay,” he wrote in an email to a city elections official that was revealed by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. A spokesman for the Police Department responded that “we have investigated every case that has been forwarded to us.”

Wisconsin’s bitter partisanship on election issues isn’t found everywhere. In neighboring Minnesota, the Democratic legislature and GOP Gov. Tim Pawlenty cooperated this year in passing reforms to address problems from the controversial 2008 recount that handed Democrat Al Franken a U.S. Senate seat.

The legislature approved several reforms proposed by the Center for the American Experiment, a local think tank. They included clarifying what ballots should be included in recounts (to keep the issue out of the courts) and moving towards centralizing absentee ballot counting.

Sadly, it looks as if Congress could follow Wisconsin’s example instead. The Milwaukee Police Department’s report on the 2004 election concluded “the one thing that could eliminate a large percentage of the fraud” would be to end same-day registration. Today, eight other states have some form of Election Day voter registration: Idaho, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Wyoming. Montana began Election Day voter registration in 2006, North Carolina in 2007, and Iowa in 2008.

But Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold, a Democrat, has introduced federal legislation to mandate same-day registration in every state, claiming the system has worked well in his state. Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York is readying a bill to override the election laws of all 50 states and require universal voter registration—which would automatically register anyone on key government lists. This is a move guaranteed to create duplicate registrations, register some illegal aliens, and sow confusion.

We are in danger of forgetting the lessons of the 2000 recount debacle in Florida. Election laws should be clear, simple, applied equally, and balance ease of voting with the need for ballot integrity. A unanimous Supreme Court warned about the danger of loose election laws when it vacated a Ninth Circuit opinion, which had enjoined the use of Arizona’s new voter ID law on the grounds it would disenfranchise voters.

The court made the obvious point that “disenfranchisement” is a two-way street. Fraud, it noted in Gonzales v. Arizona (2006), “drives honest citizens out of the democratic process. . . . [V]oters who fear their legitimate votes will be outweighed by fraudulent ones will feel disenfranchised.”

What almost happened in Wisconsin this month—and could happen in Washington later this year—would increase chances of future Florida-style meltdowns and further undermine confidence in our election system.

Now, where is the reporting on this by the libtards at the MJS? Oh, I know, it’s non-existent. The MJS staff is still too busy putting on their knee pads for the Democratic Party. Well, we all know that Marty Kaiser, Chief Dem Apologist revered “News Dude” and Steve Smith Gutless Chairman of JRN, more concerned with his salary than running a news source in MKE an upstanding member of the community won’t bring Russ’s attempt to steal elections on a national level to you on a local news level.

That’s why you check in occasionally on this cutting edge blog. To get the stuff the MJS won’t.

Volcano Thoughts

As you all know, airtravel is a mess right now due to volcanic ash from Iceland passing over Northern Europe. Specifically, it has halted flights in the U.K., Holland and Germany which harbor the major airports. Nice summary of the situation here.

Naturally, there is a desire to get the planes back in the air as millions are stranded. If I was ordered to fly, as a pilot, I wouldn’t do it right now for the simple reason that volcano ash when heated, turns to glass. It doesn’t take much. From the above link.

Separately, senior Western diplomat said several NATO F-16 fighters suffered engine damage after flying through the volcanic ash cloud covering large parts of Europe. The official declined to provide more details on the military flights, except to say that glasslike deposits were found inside the planes’ engines after they patroled over European air space.

Now, would you want to be on a plane accumulating glass in the engines? Me, neither.

If I had to get to London or Paris, here’s how I would do it. Fly to Istanbul. Board the Orient Express. Get off at the desired destination. Yeah, it takes a little longer but no glass in the engines, either.

Go Green, Go Broke

From the 4/10/10 Wall Street Journal

In Los Angeles’s latest soap opera, city controller Wendy Greuel has declared an “urgent financial crisis.” Get used to hearing those words a lot across the urban landscape.

Ms. Greuel warned that next month L.A. could run out of money if the city’s Department of Water and Power doesn’t make good on its promise to pay the city $73.5 million. If that happens, the city may have to start depleting its emergency reserve fund, which could hurt its credit rating and make it more difficult to borrow to pay future bills. Due to the city’s bleeding finances, Moody’s earlier this week downgraded the city’s general obligation bond rating to Aa2 from Aa3.

What’s brought the famed city to this pass? Global warming, of course. Or more precisely, the crusade against global warming.

A couple of months ago, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa proposed electricity rate hikes of 9% to 28% to wean the city off coal and pay for its aggressive renewable energy portfolio. Residents and businesses bristled at such a steep increase in their electric bills, especially during a recession. Facing irate constituents, the city council nixed the utility’s proposed 5.7% three-month rate hike, the first of four increases planned.

This in turn prompted the utility to withhold $73.5 million of the $220.5 million surplus revenue it was expected to transfer to the city. Without the rate hike, the utility’s interim manager S. David Freeman says it doesn’t have enough money to pay its own bills and hand the city the $73.5 million. The city council complains that the utility is holding the city hostage.

What’s really holding the city hostage is the state’s global warming law and the mayor’s green energy agenda, which includes boosting renewables to 40% of the city’s energy portfolio by 2020. The state’s renewable goal is 33%. The mayor says the city could face hundreds of millions of dollars in fines if it doesn’t comply with the state’s numerous renewable energy and carbon reduction mandates. But of course complying with these mandates means a sharp increase in energy prices, as Los Angeles residents are now discovering.

L.A.’s predicament is merely a preview of what municipalities across California have to look forward to as the state’s renewable energy mandates begin to bite. It’s also a cautionary tale for states that want to emulate California’s global warming law. Little wonder a popular revolt is building against the state’s carbon dictates. A repeal referendum may make it on the ballot in November.

Think Pol Pot Doyle and the rest of the Dems will pay attention to this? Nah. They’d rather leave a legacy of bankrupting Wisconsin.

A Little Preview of The Future

From the Friday, 4-9-2010 Wall Street Journal Any emphasis mine.

This week it became impossible in Massachusetts for small businesses and individuals to buy health-care coverage after Governor Deval Patrick imposed price controls on premiums. Read on, because under ObamaCare this kind of political showdown will soon be coming to an insurance market near you. The Massachusetts small-group market that serves about 800,000 residents shut down after Mr. Patrick kicked off his re-election campaign by presumptively rejecting about 90% of the premium increases the state’s insurers had asked regulators to approve. Health costs have run off the rails since former GOP Governor Mitt Romney and Beacon Hill passed universal coverage in 2006, and Mr. Patrick now claims price controls are the sensible response to this ostensibly industry greed.

Yet all of the major Massachusetts insurers are nonprofits. Three of largest four—Blue Cross Blue Shield, Tufts Health Plan and Fallon Community Health—posted operating losses in 2009. In an emergency suit heard in Boston superior court yesterday, they argued that the arbitrary rate cap will result in another $100 million in collective losses this year and make it impossible to pay the anticipated cost of claims. It may even threaten the near-term solvency of some companies. So until the matter is resolved, the insurers have simply stopped selling new policies.

A court decision is expected by Monday, but state officials have demanded that the insurers—under the threat of fines and other regulatory punishments—resume offering quotes by today and to revert to year-old base premiums. Let that one sink in: Mr. Patrick has made the health insurance business so painful the government actually has to order private companies to sell their products (albeit at sub-market costs).

One irony is that Mr. Patrick’s own Attorney General and his insurance regulators have concluded—to their apparent surprise—that the reason Massachusetts premiums are the highest in the nation is the underlying cost of health care, not the supposed industry abuses that Mr. Patrick and his political mentor President Obama like to cite.

On top of that, like ObamaCare, integral to the Massachusetts overhaul are mandates that require insurers to cover anyone who applies regardless of health status or pre-existing conditions and to charge everyone about the same rates. This allows people to wait until they’re about to incur major medical expenses before buying insurance and transfer the costs to everyone else. This week Blue Cross Blue Shield reported a big uptick in short-term customers who ran up costs more than four times the average, only to drop the coverage within three months.

Last July, Charlie Baker detailed similar gaming at Harvard Pilgrim, the health plan he used to run. Between April 2008 and March 2009, about 40% of its new enrollees stayed with it for fewer than five months and on average incurred costs about 600% higher than the company would have otherwise expected.

Mr. Baker is almost certain to be Mr. Patrick’s GOP opponent in the fall election. The Governor’s lurch toward price controls is obviously part of a bid to tar the former CEO as an industry villain. David Plouffe, the architect of Mr. Obama’s Presidential campaign, has signed on as a Patrick 2010 consultant. These kinds of collisions between politics and health care are going to occur constantly across the country as ObamaCare kicks in.

So, for all of you ignorant cocksuckers who who think Obamacare is the answer. You are wrong. So sorry, Lah. You are going to be paying more and enjoying it less. Me? I’m going to leave the country and give up my passport. I’m getting old and I’m going to need healthcare. I can pay for it, too. But I expect value for money.

I’m also sorry I put my ass on the line for what used to be America.

The Big VAT

Well, looks like my friend over at Real Debate is in for more disbelief. I realize that I’ve not been posting at all lately and that a lot of you miss the rant and raves commentary of this cutting edge blog. As you might expect, this post involves taxes.

From the Opinion Page of The Wall Street Journal. Any emphasis mine.

Volcker on the VAT
The middle class is where the money is.

Kudos for candor to Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve Chairman and current White House economic adviser, for admitting what other Democrats also know but don’t want to admit until after the November election: The political class is preparing to pass a European-style value-added tax.

Answering a question at the New York Historical Society on Tuesday, Mr. Volcker said that a VAT—a consumption tax levied along stages of production—”was not as toxic an idea” as it has been, and that both a VAT and some kind of tax on energy need to be on the table. “If at the end of the day we need to raise taxes, we should raise taxes,” he said.

We’ve long predicted that this would be the White House fiscal strategy, and its new deficit commission is bound to propose something along these lines. In Europe, a VAT rate that reaches 20% in some countries applies to countless products and services, so the middle class would be hit especially hard.

Though Mr. Volcker didn’t say this, he is acknowledging that taxes on the rich can’t begin to finance the levels of new spending that the current government has unleashed. Even the expiration of the Bush tax rates next January and the new taxes in the health-care bill won’t be enough.

In recent decades, the current tax code has yielded revenue on average of 18.5% or so of GDP, whether tax rates go up or down. The wealthy adjust their behavior or shield more income via loopholes, so income-tax increases never gain as much revenue as politicians claim. With spending as a share of GDP now at 25%, Democrats have to soak the middle class because that’s where the real money is.

Look for media Democrats to begin explaining why a VAT is essential to U.S. well-being, even as they fail to recall Mr. Obama’s 2008 pledge not to raise taxes on the middle class. We told you that the U.S. can’t have a European welfare state without European tax rates, and so France, here we come.

Now, the idea of a VAT tax is “not toxic” as long as that is the ONLY tax, i.e. it replaces the income tax. But that won’t be the case. When the lameduck Congress takes up this issue, you can be sure the VAT will be IN ADDITION to the current income tax. Of course, since 47% of Americans don’t pay taxes, they won’t think that’s a big deal. But it will be.

A VAT tax is the most heinous of all taxes since it takes a higher proportion of money from lower income households. Don’t forget, everybody pays the same rate on goods and services. Of course, this means that people who foolishly believed that 0bama wouldn’t raise their taxes will feel the biggest impact of a Value-Added-TAX. So sorry.

This is Really Stupid

I really don’t like stupid at all. From Fox News

The independent filmmaker who brought ACORN to its knees last year with an undercover expose was arrested this week along with three others, including the son of a federal prosecutor, and accused of trying to interfere with the phones at Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office.

I’m sure the left will have some fun with this but, when you think about it, it’s no different than the stupidity of the left…which is to say, really stupid.