The Smoke Break

You want some brie with that whine?

Pater Obama Is Watching You

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If the following makes you feel like you’ve just entered the Twilight Zone, welcome to the Obamanation.

Folks who are interested applying to the “Cash for Clunkers” program are directed to a federal government website, cars.gov.  If they want to participate, their dealer fills out an application and, in order to submit it, has to go through the usual agreement to the site’s terms and conditions.  Or are they really the usual “terms and conditions”?

When it involves the Obama administration, the sad truth is that it’s a scam designed to take something away from you.  In this case, when you’re a car dealer, it’s your privacy.

The dealer user agreement reads, in part:

“This application provides access to the DoT CARS system.  When logged on to the CARS system, your computer is considered a Federal computer system and is the property of the U.S. Government.

Any or all uses of this system and all files on this system may be intercepted, monitored, recorded, copied, audited, inspected, and disclosed to authorized CARS, DoT, and law enforcement personnel, as well as authorized officials of other agencies, both domestic and foreign.”

What this means is that EVERYTHING on that computer immediately becomes fair game to the Feds.  Including customer information.  And leaving the website won’t stop them.  Through the use of what is commonly known as “malware” (malicious software programs deliberately placed on a computer, normally to steal information) and those inevitable tracking cookies, the government can continue to monitor all activities until their code is found and wiped off your system.

‘Tis truly a nasty way to gather information about American citizens, but unfortunately, it’s legal. 

Thanks to Glenn Beck for exposing this.

Pelosi Beats The Socialized Medicine Drum

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CSPAN taped House Speaker Nancy Pelosi talking about the status of the “health care reform” legislation.  In it she states that the “glory days are coming to an end for the health insurance industy in our country.  Their profits are obscene, they have increased enormously over the past few years at the expense of America’s consumers.”

She goes on to gush about how wonderful things will be when the government takes over the business of providing health insurance:

“Think of what that means for the vitality of our economy!  So we can encourage entrepreneurship while people have the confidence they will have health insurance and can take more risk.

“There will be a cap on what you pay to the insurance companies each year, but no cap on the benefits you receive.

“And this makes all the difference in the world.”

That “difference”, dangled like a carrot in front of numbnuts suffering from liberal entitlement-derangement syndrome, is between profit and loss, sustainability and bankruptcy.  If you pay someone a dollar and they give you back ten, they are immediately out nine dollars.  If a hundred people pay someone a dollar and are given back ten, that person is then out $900.  If 1,000 people pay one dollar and get back ten, that person is out $9,000.  And if 300 million people pay a dollar and get back ten, that someone is out $270 million.

It’s a difference that, with the “President leading the way, with us being a drumbeat, an echo chamber of the President’s message,” will kill not only people subject to the government’s control of medicine, but the American economy.

Obama Gets His Kink On

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We love arts and literature here at the Smoke Break.  Our homes have real artwork on the walls and overflowing personal libraries.  We each pursue artistic pasttimes.  And we understand that art is subjective and what makes one person swoon just as quickly makes another person gag.

But like Potter Stewart so succinctly wrote in Jacobellis v. Ohio in 1964, “…pornography” is hard to define but “I know it when I see it.”  So when it now comes to light that the National Endowment for the Arts is sending some $80 million of its stimulus spoils to support pornographic live theater in San Francisco, well, let’s just say we’re pretty disgusted.

Surely, we don’t care what blows your skirt up, but forcing everyone to help you get your jollies crosses the line.  In truth, art is a luxury and when the unemployment rate is inching towards 10% and everyone is being asked to tighten their belts, there are far better uses for the money.

CounterPULSE received a $25,000 grant in the “Dance” category; a staffer there said they were pleased to receive the grant, “which over the next year will be used to preserve jobs at our small non-profit.”

(CounterPULSE, whose “long-running pansexual performance series” called “Perverts Put Out”, invites guests to “join your fellow pervs for some explicit, twisted fun.”)

Similarly, the director of Frameline, the gay and lesbian film house, told FOXNews.com in an e-mail that their $50,000 grant was not to support any program in particular.

“The grant is not intended for a specific program; it’s to be used for the preservation of jobs at our media arts nonprofit organization over the next year during the economic downturn,” wrote K.C. Price, who listed four other NEA grants his organization has received.

(Frameline recently screened Thundercrack:  “Witness if you dare, the world’s only underground kinky art porno horror film, complete with four men, three women and a gorilla. You will be seduced into accepting this orgy of sexual liberation!”)

An NEA spokeswoman defended the agency’s choices and said its grants would help “preserve jobs in danger of going away or that had gone away because of the economic downturn.”

There are millions of small, non-profit organizations that make real life-saving contributions to society.  Most are denied grants for operating expenses by both private foundations and by the government. 

This is yet another outstanding example of the idiocy of this administration and this Congress.  Not to mention its hypocrisy:

“…what I will need from all of you is unprecedented responsibility and accountability on all of our parts.”

“…a project that will waste that money, I will not hesitate to call them out on it and put a stop to it.”

“The American people are watching. They expect to see the money that they’ve earned, that they’ve worked so hard to earn, spent in its intended purposes without waste, without inefficiency, without fraud.”

(President Obama, United States Conference of Mayors, February 20, 2009)

A Learning Moment

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A learning moment, indeed.  Of the President’s “empathy”, in action:

 

Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

 

At Real Clear Politics, Thomas Lifson correctly sees this as a metaphor for Obama’s real attitude towards those who are, shall we say, less than worthy, less than perfect in his eyes. 

“The elderly are left in the back, with only the kindness of the Crowleys of the world, the stand up guys, to depend on. The government has other priorities.

“The President presses ahead with a program that will tell them (older Americans) to take painkillers instead of getting that artificial hip.”

A stark contrast to the predessor upon whom Obama still places all the blame for the problems his “fixes” are spiraling out of control:

 

 

 

President Bush with Senator Byrd

President Bush with Senator Byrd

 

 

It’s A Clunker, All Right

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“Cash For Clunkers”, the Obaminable little project to encourage folks (whose number include more and more unemployed every day so a fine target market…what?) to replace their “clunker” (read:  gas-guzzler) with a spiffy, new “green” vehicle, kicked off last Friday.

It’s just been reported the program is being ended. 

Tonight.

At midnight.

Through late Wednesday, 22,782 vehicles had been purchased through the program and nearly $96 million had been spent. But dealers raised concerns about large backlogs in the processing of the deals in the government system, prompting the suspension.

A survey of 2,000 dealers by the National Automobile Dealers Association found about 25,000 deals had not yet been approved by NHTSA, or nearly 13 trades per store. It raised concerns that with about 23,000 dealers taking part in the program, auto dealers may already have surpassed the 250,000 vehicle sales funded by the $1 billion program.

The government failed to fully understand the potential financial ramifications of this knee-jerk program.  They also seem to be having problems handling it on their end.  Now they’re rushing through “health care reform”.

You really think that could possibly work any better?

 

Government-Run Health Care Is Deadly Medicine

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Both the House and Senate are putting on their best Sunday-go-to-meetin’ faces and telling the media that work on “health care reform” is 80% complete.  This means that 80% of the endless laundry list of economic and personal-rights negatives in the bills in both House and Senate are in place and they’re not going to go anywhere.

This means that it is a sword of Damocles that hangs over the heads of the American people as the Obama administration prepares for a complete government takeover of the practice of medicine in the United States.

If that doesn’t frighten you to death, rest assured that with their kind of government “help”, you’ll be dead soon enough.  Especially if you look at who’s going to be making decisions about what kind of care the government is going to allow you.

One of them is Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and the health-policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget and a member of Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research.  His biography shows him to be a “bioethicist” and a  fellow at the right-to-die Hastings Center.  Here are some of his views about modern medicine.

“Vague promises of savings from cutting waste, enhancing prevention and wellness, installing electronic medical records and improving quality are merely ‘lipstick’ cost control, more for show and public relations than for true change.” (Health Affairs Feb. 27, 2008)

(It’s more efficient to start with the root cause:  reduce the number of people alive and needing treatment?)

Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, “as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others.” (Journal of the American Medical Association, June 18, 2008)

(Remind that cancer patient whose treatment allowed them be around just long enough to see their son or daughter take their first steps, or graduate from college and their family about this, ok?)

Medical care should be reserved for the non-disabled, not given to those “who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens . . . An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.” (Hastings Center Report, Nov.-Dec. ’96)

(But it’s all right with the Obama administration if dead people vote.)

“Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years.” (Lancet, Jan. 31)

(You’re already 52, Dr. Emanuel.  Ready to start moving to the back of the line?)

“Hospital rooms in the United States offer more privacy . . . physicians’ offices are typically more conveniently located and have parking nearby and more attractive waiting rooms” (JAMA, June 18, 2008)

(Heaven forbid that people who are sick might find some modicum of comfort in the place they receive treatment.)

“Every favor to a constituency should be linked to support for the health-care reform agenda. If the automakers want a bailout, then they and their suppliers have to agree to support and lobby for the administration’s health-reform effort.” (Nov. 16, 2008, Health Care Watch)

(So that explains why the UAW retirees now have to pay for their own Viagra!)

Maybe this is why Ted Kennedy has been keeping such a low profile.

How Liberals Propose To Make The World A Better Place

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To those of us in the Midwest, this about sums up why things in California are such a mess.  And why with people like Pelosi and allegedly-Occidental-college-educated Obama in charge in Washington, we’re now heading to hell in the proverbial handbasket.

 

How Hard Is It?

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Honestly, you’d think we were asking for the Moon.   Candidate Barack Obama even made a big deal about it and “promised” the American people that bills going up for a vote would be available for public review for 5 days prior.

Instead, the idiocy of 1,000+ page bills and their last-second wheelin’-dealin’ amendments slammed through Congress without even being read continues unabated.  I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of it.  We PAY those wankers in Washington to oversee federal matters, yet the majority continue to skate along doing little more than nothing, and only then if it’s something that might get them reelected.

Well, even though neither Congress nor the White House understands accountability, I do.  As do millions and millions of Americans and  Let Freedom Ring has taken a lead in holding their feet to the fire.  They’ve created a simple pledge and sent it for signature to all members of the House and Senate.  And I do mean its simple:

Responsible Healthcare Reform Pledge

I, ___________________, pledge to my constituents and to the American people that I will not vote to enact any healthcare reform package that:

1) I have not read, personally, in its entirety; and

2) Has not been available, in its entirety, to the American people on the Internet for at least 72 hours, so that they can read it, too.

Should be a no-brainer, right?  Maybe politicians find plain English too foreign a concept these days or think it’s a trick question like, “So, exactly when did you stop beating your wife?” or “Please explain exactly what this bill says”, but regardless the reason, as of this writing only 87 out of the 535 Members of Congress have signed it.  Only one Senator has directly addressed the request by writing back that though they do not, as a rule, sign pledges, the idea has their support and said support may be shared with the American people.

You can go here and see if your Senator or Representative is listed.  If not, it’s time to remind them – again- who’s really the boss.

How Will You Spend Your Summer Vacation?

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That is, if you even get to take one this year.

Apparently things in these “tough times” aren’t so bad when it’s other people’s money you’re spending.  Even if they are giving it to you in the form of a salary and you don’t have to pay for one of those financially “devastating” health insurance policies.

The Vineyard Gazette Online is reporting that the First Family is renting a 28.5 acre “farm” on Martha’s Vineyard at the end of next month. 

The 28.5-acre property some five hundred yards down Cobb’s Hill Road, spans the Chilmark and West Tisbury town line and overlooks Town Cove, the westernmost finger of the Tisbury Great Pond.

There are four dwellings on Blue Heron Farm property, including a white Victorian farm house, a reconstructed Pennsylvania hay barn and a Vermont shed, the latter two of which date back to the 1800s and were transported and reconstructed by West Tisbury builder Rick Anderson in the early 1990s.

Named by its previous owners, the late New York real estate developer M. Anthony Fisher and his wife Anne, the farm has undergone several renovations in the last decade. Situated overlooking a remote finger of the Great Pond, it is quiet and private, with an apple orchard, flower and vegetable gardens, stone walls, a swimming pool, golf practice tee and small basketball court for the basketball-loving president.

It is understood that Mr. Obama and his family will also be offered access to the private portion of Squibnocket Beach if they so choose.

While the mechanics of renting the property were still ongoing at press time, the Gazette has learned that a rental agreement for the farm will comprise three leases, one to be held by the Obamas, another by the Secret Service and a third by a White House entourage.

The amount of the rental has not been disclosed, but up-Island properties similar to Blue Heron Farm rent for between $35,000 to $50,000 per week.