Items of Interest for Thinking Americans
Item: According to pollsters at Rasmussen Reports, 43% of Americans believe that government programs increase poverty in the nation while just 22% of the nation’s likely-voting adults believe that those programs decrease poverty. 23% say they have no impact. 33% of all voters say the government anti-poverty programs are at least somewhat effective. 62% disagree and say they’re not effective. This includes 7% who believe the programs are Very Effective and 21% who say they are Not At All Effective.
Item: You GO, Arizona. They’ve done it again in Arizona where Proposition 106 (the Healthcare Freedom Act for Arizona) would amend the Arizona Constitution to prohibit any law from compelling any person, employer or health care provider to participate in any health care system, allow a person or employer to pay directly for lawful health care services without being penalized or fined, and allows health care providers to accept direct payment for lawful health care services without being penalized or fined. Besides Obamacare being a mad law in a multitude of ways and increasing the National Debt it’s horrifically complicated and creates 388 brand new federal agencies or offices. Yeah, Arizona!
Item: the recently defeated Defense Funding Bill had provisions about illegal aliens; openly homosexual behavior in the armed forces; and abortion . . . wonder if there was anything in there about the military’s budget?
Item: According to Rasmussen, 52% of Likely U.S. Voters say their own views are closer to Sarah Palin’s than they are to President Obama’s, while only 40% say their views are closer to the president’s than to those of the former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate. Within the Political Class, however, 68% say their views are more like Obama’s, while 63% of Mainstream voters describe their own views as more like Palin’s.
Eighty-four percent (84%) of Republicans and 59% of voters not affiliated with either major party say their views are more like Palin’s. Eighty-one percent (81%) of Democrats say they think more like the president. White House Press secretary Robert Gibbs last week said Palin is perhaps “the most formidable force in the Republican Party right now,” but just 22% of all voters agree. Fifty-two percent (52%) do not believe Palin is the party’s most formidable force. Twenty-six percent (26%) aren’t sure.
Item: bumper stickers on a hybrid-electric car . . . “Save the polar bears, stop global warming” and “Don’t vote, it just encourages the bums” Sounds like the Dems are praying for a very light turnout . . . perhaps the bears will save them?
Item: Barack Obama’s aunt from Kenya, an illegal alien for several years, claims the U.S. now owes her an American citizenship.
Item: 50% of Americans give Obama a “poor” rating on economic issues, according to Rasmussen while 35% rate his performance on jobs and the economy as either excellent or good. 71% of Americans say the best way to create jobs is to cut taxes while only 17% prefer increased government spending as the best way to create jobs. In another poll, 61% of Americans want Obamacare repealed with 56% saying it will be bad for the country and 61% saying it will increase federal deficits and the national debt.
Item: Because of the new Obamacare regulations beginning to kick in or threatening to kick in by 2014, some insurance companies have dropped child coverage . . . which would soon be mandated till age 26 under their parents’ carrier by Obamacare and would even be required regardless of pre-existing circumstances no matter if the parents waited until their children were sick before signing up for coverage.
Item: Ever heard the term “shovel-ready?” The stimulus bill that funded a lot of $10,000 “your stimulus dollars at work” signs, liberal art projects and esoteric research grants immediately, but which was supposed to quickly get the country back to work with shovel-ready projects has apparently set up an almost impenetrable red-tape obstacle course for legitimate businesses seeking stimulus funds. Many reports exist of would-be employers spending a year or more seeking to clear legal hurdles thrown up before them to prevent their hiring of new people and receiving stimulus funds.
Item: Reports that officially the recession ended in May, 2009, appear to have been greatly exaggerated since the country’s lost more jobs than it created during the ensuing fifteen months.
Item: 56% of the HOPE-benefitted students (Helping Outstanding Students Educationally) did NOT need any financial help in Georgia (the originating state) and across the country and not surprisingly, HOPE programs are running out of money without helping very many needy students.
Item: Medical marijuana has caused police departments across the nation huge problems deciding who’s legal and who’s not and even who’s a dealer and who’s not.
Item: Remember Rachel Carson’s ecological disaster, ‘er ecological masterpiece Silent Spring? The sixty million malaria deaths that have occurred each year since DDT was banned (in 1971 only 43,000 deaths worldwide from Malaria occurred, today two million die from malaria annually) despite the paucity of scientific evidence (which actually amounts to zero scientific evidence) she provided have got scientists debating the virtue of a world without mosquitoes. Most say their environments might “hiccup” and then go on as normal. How do you kill several dozen TRillion of something? They’re working on it . . . . Rajjpuut suggests that mosquitoes, damn them, play an important role in pollination. The males (which don’t bite) are nectar drinkers and the scientists should know that. Kill ‘em, kill a lot of ‘em and prevent malaria and the other eight awful diseases they carry, but don’t go too far.
Item: President Obama recently denied that he and his administration have repeatedly vilified business and denied that Americans are growing frustrated with his job performance but he did it in a very strange way . . . “IF I was green or I was purple, people are still going to be upset if they have no job or they’re losing their home; we’ve done everything we could to buck up businesses.” Hmmmmm besides his grammar mistake . . . what exactly has the president’s color got to do with the economy? Somebody send the “too-cerebral” Barack a book on the subjunctive and remind him, that despite his much ballyhooed “post-racial presidency,” everything in this country is NOT related to someone’s skin color. And NO, MR. PRESIDENT, taking over businesses is NOT the same as bucking them up.
Item: The “Dream Bill” to benefit illegal aliens and “Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell” repeal amendments within the Obama defense budget proposal were rejected again today, both for the umpteenth time. There seems to be no statute of limitations for relief from facing ill-conceived laws.
Item: Why is it that no conservatives or Republicans ever mentions that 4.2% of Blacks voted for McCain and 48% of Whites voted for Obama (more than and a higher percentage than either Kerry or Gore received) when racism is implied as something that Whites only are guilty of?
Item: Some Republicans are coming to the rescue of Ms. Christine O’Donnell their Delaware senate nominee recently lambasted by Karl Rove and others. It seems to Ol’ Rajjpuut that Rove’s got it right and that Mr. Castle (whom O’Donnell defeated) was preferable to a one-time witch and an admitted present-time Marxist (Coombs, her Democratic opponent) . . . good work TEA Party Express.
Item: Obama’s still telling his “car in the ditch” lie . . . why don’t conservatives or Republicans remind the Democrats that with their help and ACORN’s abuse and 30 years of CRA ’77 mortgage-guarantee law and its expansions they took the country from ¼ of 1 percent bad home loans to 34% of all home loans being fiscally-irresponsible and granted at less than 3% down payment . . . why not remind progressives and Democrats that they created the sub-prime lending crisis and Obama’s treasury secretary recently said that without G.W. Bush’s 2007 law the recession would have been much deeper and home prices would have plummeted . . . why is this never mentioned?
Item: the Democrats and Obama Administration have made a big deal about them being behind “extending the Obama tax-cuts to the middle-class” while the Republicans, they say, want tax-cuts for millionaires. FACT CHECK. It is impossible to extend what doesn’t exist. There are no “Obama tax cuts for the middle-class” being presently discussed; the cuts in question are about nine years old now and were created by the Bush administration. Secondly, the Republicans want to extend tax-cuts to 100% of Americans while Obama wants to raise taxes on the job providers, the vast majority of which are not millionaires but rather individuals earning more than $200,000 or couples earning more than $500,000. Meanwhile Mr. Obama and his administration have pointedly refused to bring up legislation to extend his stimulus bill’s “Making Work Pay Tax Credit” which provided individuals up to $400 and couples up to $800 in credits from their withholding. If anything could be called an “Obama middle-class tax cut” that would have been it. But the Administration has pointedly NOT created a budget this year and any MWPTC tax cut extension would either have to be passed within the overall budget or raised as a separate item . . . which the Dems have also pointedly decided NOT to do thus far. Whatever names you call them by, eliminating such programs amounts to a willful tax increase which is a monstrously bad idea during a recession, much less a severe recession.
