Obama Knew Youthful Poverty (?)

Obama Knew Youthful Poverty (?)

Last week our po' boy President let us know how tough life was when he was a child of poverty. Unlike Mitt Romney, he says, "I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth." There wouldn't have been room in there for a silver spoon because he always seems to have his foot in his mouth.

Not only did poor little Barry Soetoro Obama have to settle for a gold spoon, but when they took that away from him, he had to improvise tiny spoons for his college drug use. And it just gets sadder. He remembers that as a child he had to take subways and buses to get to a place where he could buy fresh fruit (Michelle’s big on fixing that modern problem, ya know). I didn’t even know they had subways in Indonesia and Kenya, but I’ll take his word for it. And if he wanted fresh fruit at grandma’s, couldn’t he just walk out into the fields and grab a nice fresh pineapple? I keep waiting for him to steal Oprah Winfrey's story of eating mashed potato sandwiches.

Mitt Romney had the misfortune of being born into a family that did have money, a great deal of it by the time Mitt was a youngster. But papa George taught his son frugality, which grew out of his own experience of hunger and want during FDR’s Great Depression. And contrary to popular belief, Mitt didn’t have the chauffeur pull the Rolls Royce around to the grand portico to pick him up and take him to the fresh fruit stand for guavas and mangoes (or pineapple, for that matter). During Mitt’s younger years they were more likely to hop into the family Nash Rambler (George was moving up in the company at the time).

Said Obama: “In this country prosperity does not trickle down, prosperity grows from the bottom up. That’s why I’m always confused when we keep having the same argument with folks who don’t seem to remember how America was built.” Obviously he got his history from Howard Zinn and his politics from Marx. How does Obama build that bottom-up wealth? Well, not by trickling. He literally pours federal largess on his poor and oppressed acolytes. He’s like a manic Robin Hood. He robs from everybody who works so he can give their money to people who don’t like to work. He’s confused, all right.

Obama’s idea of how to encourage growth from the bottom up is not particularly new. It was invented by the late Lyndon B. Johnson, President and creator of welfare dependency on a massive scale. He called it the Great Society which has evolved into the Bankrupt Society. Nearly a half-century later, and after flooding them with a few trillion no-strings dollars, the poor are poorer than ever. Obama goes Johnson one step better. He redefines the middle class as “rich,” and steals from them. If this bottom-up plan continues much longer, we’ll run out of rich people to pay the bills for the non-working poor.

As somebody recently said, “I don’t know a single poor person who was able to hire other people.” Well, according to Obama, that’s because the poor person has to pay for his two cars, giant screen TV, filet mignon, six illegitimate children and instant slum dwelling before he can hire anybody to help him spend the taxpayers money. The solution is to take even more money from the “rich” and hand it to the poor so the poor can hire others to spend the taxpayers money. It’s hard work getting into your new SUV to go to the grocery store to use your EBT “free food” card to buy those steaks. And it’s also a hard intellectual exercise to get that quart of Johnnie Walker and those Winston 100s classified as food.

At the same time he was making his Ohio silver spoon speech, he also visited several Cleveland suburbs where unemployment has been very high for a long time. He continued his class-warfare tactics throughout the state. Ohio is a battleground state, and Obama is spending a lot of the taxes from the “rich” to convince out-of-work industrial workers that he is looking out for their interests. In other words, he isn’t campaigning on the public dime, he’s “finding solutions.”

This President is the stiffest, most insincere and uptight man in the office since Richard Nixon was photographed walking along the beach at surf’s edge in a suit and tie, but carrying his shoes and socks to exhibit that he had the common touch. I don’t care if a President was born poor or rich. That tells you nothing about the candidate’s actual capacity for understanding, empathizing and finding solutions other than handouts. I’ve known very wealthy people who were poor in their youth and grew up to simply hate poor people. And I’ve known very wealthy people who were very well-off in their youth as well who truly had a sense of the plight of the poor and how (as the United Negro College Fund used to say) the poor need a “hand, not a handout.”

When a business owner has to pay $50,000 a year for a simple clerical employee as salary, benefits and payroll taxes, he always has to be cautious about hiring new personnel. In bad economic times made worse by the government’s hostility toward business, crippling regulations, and love of taxes on the “rich,” that same business owner is simply unlikely to hire anybody new and may have to lay off or terminate valued longtime employees. He can pay more in taxes, or he can hire new employees and retain older ones. But he can’t do both when the future has been rendered dangerously uncertain by leftist social engineering schemes.

Silver spoon or not, Obama simply doesn’t understand that poor people almost never create wealth. Poor people who get jobs because wealthier people with money and businesses are anxious to hire them or invest in them then have the opportunity to create wealth themselves. But wealth doesn’t spring up from the bottom by spontaneous generation. Romney does understand that, so if he was actually silver spoon fed, I’ll forgive him.

Last week our po' boy President let us know how tough life was when he was a child of poverty. Unlike Mitt Romney, he says, "I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth." There wouldn't have been room in there for a silver spoon because he always seems to have his foot in his mouth.

Not only did poor little Barry Soetoro Obama have to settle for a gold spoon, but when they took that away from him, he had to improvise tiny spoons for his college drug use. And it just gets sadder. He remembers that as a child he had to take subways and buses to get to a place where he could buy fresh fruit (Michelle’s big on fixing that modern problem, ya know). I didn’t even know they had subways in Indonesia and Kenya, but I’ll take his word for it. And if he wanted fresh fruit at grandma’s, couldn’t he just walk out into the fields and grab a nice fresh pineapple? I keep waiting for him to steal Oprah Winfrey's story of eating mashed potato sandwiches.

Mitt Romney had the misfortune of being born into a family that did have money, a great deal of it by the time Mitt was a youngster. But papa George taught his son frugality, which grew out of his own experience of hunger and want during FDR’s Great Depression. And contrary to popular belief, Mitt didn’t have the chauffeur pull the Rolls Royce around to the grand portico to pick him up and take him to the fresh fruit stand for guavas and mangoes (or pineapple, for that matter). During Mitt’s younger years they were more likely to hop into the family Nash Rambler (George was moving up in the company at the time).

Said Obama: “In this country prosperity does not trickle down, prosperity grows from the bottom up. That’s why I’m always confused when we keep having the same argument with folks who don’t seem to remember how America was built.” Obviously he got his history from Howard Zinn and his politics from Marx. How does Obama build that bottom-up wealth? Well, not by trickling. He literally pours federal largess on his poor and oppressed acolytes. He’s like a manic Robin Hood. He robs from everybody who works so he can give their money to people who don’t like to work. He’s confused, all right.

Obama’s idea of how to encourage growth from the bottom up is not particularly new. It was invented by the late Lyndon B. Johnson, President and creator of welfare dependency on a massive scale. He called it the Great Society which has evolved into the Bankrupt Society. Nearly a half-century later, and after flooding them with a few trillion no-strings dollars, the poor are poorer than ever. Obama goes Johnson one step better. He redefines the middle class as “rich,” and steals from them. If this bottom-up plan continues much longer, we’ll run out of rich people to pay the bills for the non-working poor.

As somebody recently said, “I don’t know a single poor person who was able to hire other people.” Well, according to Obama, that’s because the poor person has to pay for his two cars, giant screen TV, filet mignon, six illegitimate children and instant slum dwelling before he can hire anybody to help him spend the taxpayers money. The solution is to take even more money from the “rich” and hand it to the poor so the poor can hire others to spend the taxpayers money. It’s hard work getting into your new SUV to go to the grocery store to use your EBT “free food” card to buy those steaks. And it’s also a hard intellectual exercise to get that quart of Johnnie Walker and those Winston 100s classified as food.

At the same time he was making his Ohio silver spoon speech, he also visited several Cleveland suburbs where unemployment has been very high for a long time. He continued his class-warfare tactics throughout the state. Ohio is a battleground state, and Obama is spending a lot of the taxes from the “rich” to convince out-of-work industrial workers that he is looking out for their interests. In other words, he isn’t campaigning on the public dime, he’s “finding solutions.”

This President is the stiffest, most insincere and uptight man in the office since Richard Nixon was photographed walking along the beach at surf’s edge in a suit and tie, but carrying his shoes and socks to exhibit that he had the common touch. I don’t care if a President was born poor or rich. That tells you nothing about the candidate’s actual capacity for understanding, empathizing and finding solutions other than handouts. I’ve known very wealthy people who were poor in their youth and grew up to simply hate poor people. And I’ve known very wealthy people who were very well-off in their youth as well who truly had a sense of the plight of the poor and how (as the United Negro College Fund used to say) the poor need a “hand, not a handout.”

When a business owner has to pay $50,000 a year for a simple clerical employee as salary, benefits and payroll taxes, he always has to be cautious about hiring new personnel. In bad economic times made worse by the government’s hostility toward business, crippling regulations, and love of taxes on the “rich,” that same business owner is simply unlikely to hire anybody new and may have to lay off or terminate valued longtime employees. He can pay more in taxes, or he can hire new employees and retain older ones. But he can’t do both when the future has been rendered dangerously uncertain by leftist social engineering schemes.

Silver spoon or not, Obama simply doesn’t understand that poor people almost never create wealth. Poor people who get jobs because wealthier people with money and businesses are anxious to hire them or invest in them then have the opportunity to create wealth themselves. But wealth doesn’t spring up from the bottom by spontaneous generation. Romney does understand that, so if he was actually silver spoon fed, I’ll forgive him.

Obama Knew Youthful Poverty (?)

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Should All Nominees Be Supported?

Should All Nominees Be Supported?

Should a political party’s nominee always be supported? Generally, the answer is yes. A political party is a collection of people whose views overlap enough to give them a common interest in getting each other elected. To that end, they form a party with the implicit agreement that they will compete with each other to represent the party and then will support the nominee regardless of the outcome of the competition. Thus, the nominee should be supported. But there is an exception.

This exception arises when (1) the nominee’s views are well outside the range of common interests which hold the party together, and (2) there is a legitimate belief that supporting this nominee will harm the long term goals of the party.

On the first point, Reagan famously said that he could support anyone with whom he agreed on 80% of the issues. Reagan was making the point that it is foolish and counterproductive to require 100% agreement with a nominee before you can support them. Indeed, 100% agreement is probably impossible. Hence, this is the reason moderates should support conservatives and conservatives should support moderates and libertarians should support social conservatives and vice versa.

But Reagan’s point also contains the implicit understanding that at some point (possibly below 80% using Reagan’s formula) there is no obligation to support the nominee. Why would this be? For that, we need to look at the question of harm.

Companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year to ensure their products remain consistent. They want to make sure you find the exact same amount in each cereal box, that every batch of Mac and Cheese tastes the same, that every sock has the same number of stitches, and that every Acura uses only Acura parts. Why? Because having a consistent level of quality affects how people perceive their brands. People want to know exactly what they are getting when they make a purchase and branding achieves that -- whereas failing to maintain that consistency damages the brand because people will no longer know what to expect from their purchase.

Whether we like the idea or not, a political party is nothing more than a company, and its product or brand is an ideological range. Choosing a nominee from outside that range blurs the identity of the party and damages its brand.

How? For one thing, this will alienate supporters. Supporters expect nominees to be within the ideological range. When they aren’t, the party has violated the contract under which it claims a right to the individual’s support. It is the equivalent of McDonalds selling you a Big Mac container but including a ham sandwich rather than a burger. This is a violation of trust.

Moreover, this confuses voters. When a person represents a party or ideology, their views become associated with that party or ideology and their successes/failures taint the ideology. In other words, the nominee redefines how the public views conservatism or liberalism, and their meanings change. Hence, conservatism and Republicanism came to be associated with Nixon’s views in 1968, Reagan’s views in 1980, and Bush Jr.’s views in 2000 -- I exclude Bush Sr. because he claimed to be a moderate. Liberalism, by comparison, came to be associated with FDR, LBJ, Carter, and now Obama. Clinton called himself a moderate.

Prior to LBJ, the majority political view of the nation was FDR-liberalism. This could have continued indefinitely, except LBJ disgraced liberalism. His errors in Vietnam and his monstrous Great Society wiped out the Democratic party in the South and set the stage for a conservative resurgence. Jimmy Carter finished liberalism off by proving that Democrats are reckless spenders, incompetent managers of the economy, and militarily inept and cowardly. This set the stage for Reagan.

Reagan’s success revived conservatism while also redefining it back to its roots -- away from the big-government conservatism of the Nixon years. By the time Reagan left office, conservatism had become the natural ideology of the country and 60% of the public believed it.

This could have lasted for generations, except along came George Bush Jr. He wrapped himself in the conservative label and set about running a big government, civil-liberties-crushing, crony-capitalism, foreign-adventuring administration which so thoroughly discredited conservatism that in 2008, the voters were more radically liberal and more willing to accept liberalism than they had been at any time since LBJ. The ONLY THING THAT SAVED CONSERVATISM was the election of Barack Obama. If Obama hadn’t proven to be such a disaster, conservatism would be dead today. But Obama was a disaster and he caused a massive backlash which took the form of the Tea Party.

The lesson here is simple.

Ideologies get defined by their leaders and they get punished for the sins of their leaders. If a nominee calls himself conservative but acts like a liberal, the public doesn’t blame liberalism for his crimes and failures, it blames conservatism even if that person never once acted like a true conservative. Thus, Bush and Nixon, neither of whom could be called conservatives, discredited conservatism. LBJ/Carter/Obama, each of who were progressives and not liberals, discredited liberalism. And in each case, the only thing to save conservatism/liberalism was pure luck that someone worse came along to discredit the other side. If Moderate Joe Democrat had come along after George Bush Jr., we could well be looking at an America that views liberalism as the natural order of things and sees conservatism as meaning reckless spending, bad economic management, and cronyism.

Moreover, the nominee need not even be as disastrous as a Bush/Obama to harm the ideology. The goal of politics is to effect long term change in the country. That is simply not possible when the person representing your ideology holds views that are inconsistent with the ideology. This muddies the ideological waters and confuses the differences between the parties. In other words, when the Republicans and the Democrats both push the same solutions to the same issues, voters will come to believe there is no difference, and they will either stop voting or they will pick the party that promises them the most loot -- advantage Democrats.

This is what happens when you pick someone who is far outside the acceptable ideological range for the party or who happens to be insane. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if Newt or Santorum or Romney or Paul are so far outside the bounds that you should not support them, but ask yourself: “how bad would it be for the party, for my beliefs, and for the country if conservatism came to be defined in the way ____ sees it?”

Winning elections is important, but you don’t want to sacrifice the future to win a single election.


By the way, there's an interesting poll out which shows that 33% of Republicans want a new candidate to jump into the race. This is down from 68% only two months ago. I think the field is set.

Should a political party’s nominee always be supported? Generally, the answer is yes. A political party is a collection of people whose views overlap enough to give them a common interest in getting each other elected. To that end, they form a party with the implicit agreement that they will compete with each other to represent the party and then will support the nominee regardless of the outcome of the competition. Thus, the nominee should be supported. But there is an exception.

This exception arises when (1) the nominee’s views are well outside the range of common interests which hold the party together, and (2) there is a legitimate belief that supporting this nominee will harm the long term goals of the party.

On the first point, Reagan famously said that he could support anyone with whom he agreed on 80% of the issues. Reagan was making the point that it is foolish and counterproductive to require 100% agreement with a nominee before you can support them. Indeed, 100% agreement is probably impossible. Hence, this is the reason moderates should support conservatives and conservatives should support moderates and libertarians should support social conservatives and vice versa.

But Reagan’s point also contains the implicit understanding that at some point (possibly below 80% using Reagan’s formula) there is no obligation to support the nominee. Why would this be? For that, we need to look at the question of harm.

Companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year to ensure their products remain consistent. They want to make sure you find the exact same amount in each cereal box, that every batch of Mac and Cheese tastes the same, that every sock has the same number of stitches, and that every Acura uses only Acura parts. Why? Because having a consistent level of quality affects how people perceive their brands. People want to know exactly what they are getting when they make a purchase and branding achieves that -- whereas failing to maintain that consistency damages the brand because people will no longer know what to expect from their purchase.

Whether we like the idea or not, a political party is nothing more than a company, and its product or brand is an ideological range. Choosing a nominee from outside that range blurs the identity of the party and damages its brand.

How? For one thing, this will alienate supporters. Supporters expect nominees to be within the ideological range. When they aren’t, the party has violated the contract under which it claims a right to the individual’s support. It is the equivalent of McDonalds selling you a Big Mac container but including a ham sandwich rather than a burger. This is a violation of trust.

Moreover, this confuses voters. When a person represents a party or ideology, their views become associated with that party or ideology and their successes/failures taint the ideology. In other words, the nominee redefines how the public views conservatism or liberalism, and their meanings change. Hence, conservatism and Republicanism came to be associated with Nixon’s views in 1968, Reagan’s views in 1980, and Bush Jr.’s views in 2000 -- I exclude Bush Sr. because he claimed to be a moderate. Liberalism, by comparison, came to be associated with FDR, LBJ, Carter, and now Obama. Clinton called himself a moderate.

Prior to LBJ, the majority political view of the nation was FDR-liberalism. This could have continued indefinitely, except LBJ disgraced liberalism. His errors in Vietnam and his monstrous Great Society wiped out the Democratic party in the South and set the stage for a conservative resurgence. Jimmy Carter finished liberalism off by proving that Democrats are reckless spenders, incompetent managers of the economy, and militarily inept and cowardly. This set the stage for Reagan.

Reagan’s success revived conservatism while also redefining it back to its roots -- away from the big-government conservatism of the Nixon years. By the time Reagan left office, conservatism had become the natural ideology of the country and 60% of the public believed it.

This could have lasted for generations, except along came George Bush Jr. He wrapped himself in the conservative label and set about running a big government, civil-liberties-crushing, crony-capitalism, foreign-adventuring administration which so thoroughly discredited conservatism that in 2008, the voters were more radically liberal and more willing to accept liberalism than they had been at any time since LBJ. The ONLY THING THAT SAVED CONSERVATISM was the election of Barack Obama. If Obama hadn’t proven to be such a disaster, conservatism would be dead today. But Obama was a disaster and he caused a massive backlash which took the form of the Tea Party.

The lesson here is simple.

Ideologies get defined by their leaders and they get punished for the sins of their leaders. If a nominee calls himself conservative but acts like a liberal, the public doesn’t blame liberalism for his crimes and failures, it blames conservatism even if that person never once acted like a true conservative. Thus, Bush and Nixon, neither of whom could be called conservatives, discredited conservatism. LBJ/Carter/Obama, each of who were progressives and not liberals, discredited liberalism. And in each case, the only thing to save conservatism/liberalism was pure luck that someone worse came along to discredit the other side. If Moderate Joe Democrat had come along after George Bush Jr., we could well be looking at an America that views liberalism as the natural order of things and sees conservatism as meaning reckless spending, bad economic management, and cronyism.

Moreover, the nominee need not even be as disastrous as a Bush/Obama to harm the ideology. The goal of politics is to effect long term change in the country. That is simply not possible when the person representing your ideology holds views that are inconsistent with the ideology. This muddies the ideological waters and confuses the differences between the parties. In other words, when the Republicans and the Democrats both push the same solutions to the same issues, voters will come to believe there is no difference, and they will either stop voting or they will pick the party that promises them the most loot -- advantage Democrats.

This is what happens when you pick someone who is far outside the acceptable ideological range for the party or who happens to be insane. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if Newt or Santorum or Romney or Paul are so far outside the bounds that you should not support them, but ask yourself: “how bad would it be for the party, for my beliefs, and for the country if conservatism came to be defined in the way ____ sees it?”

Winning elections is important, but you don’t want to sacrifice the future to win a single election.


By the way, there's an interesting poll out which shows that 33% of Republicans want a new candidate to jump into the race. This is down from 68% only two months ago. I think the field is set.

Should All Nominees Be Supported?

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More Proof That Liberals Are Insane

More Proof That Liberals Are Insane

Liberalism truly is a mental condition. Time and again, liberal policies lead to disaster and yet liberals absolutely refuse to see that. If at first you don’t succeed, just keep doing the same thing over and over until you get a different result. . . and don’t you dare try to fix any problems that may arise. Consider these examples.



1. Food Stamps For Rich College Kids Liberals believe in food stamps as a way to help poor people who “don’t earn enough to survive.” So you would assume liberals would want to stop rich and middle class moochers from exploiting the food stamp program? Apparently not.



Unlike other states, Michigan allows college kids to get food stamps. Federal law forbids this, but Michigan liberals got around that by classifying college as an “employment training program.” They also check eligibility for food stamps on the basis of income only without regard to assets. Hence, someone with a ton of money but no actual income can qualify for food stamps. . . someone like Leroy Fick, who won the state lottery but remained on food stamps.



Michigan is now changing its rules. College kids can now only get food stamps if they are single mothers or if they work more than 20 hours per week and still fall within income restrictions (assets will be considered as well). This change will kick 30,000 college kids off the program and save the state $75 million per year in food stamps.



Liberals should be thrilled. These middle class to rich moochers living comfortably on parental support and federal student loans, most of whom have better job prospects upon graduation than 90% of taxpayers, were robbing taxpayers (including “the working poor”) and draining the system, which prevented the money from reaching people who really needed it. But liberals aren’t outraged at the moochers, they’re outraged at the conservative governor who has made the change. Their reasoning? A change in the law to prevent the rich from taking money meant for the poor “will be unfair to the poor.”



Stupidity or insanity?



2. Stimulus Failure (redux): The evidence is indisputable that government spending to boost an economy in the short term is a disaster. I do believe careful spending in certain types of infrastructure can lead to long term growth. For example, the creation of a highway or getting electricity to people can create a wealth of opportunities as consumers and businesses make use of those services to reach each other. But you can’t boost an economy just by hiring people to build something.



History has shown this over and over. In fact, the biggest ignored lesson of the Great Depression came from FDR’s own Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, who wrote this in his diary about their efforts to stem the recession:

“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. . . [A]fter eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. . . and an enormous debt to boot!”

Sound familiar? Now the Democrats want to go for another stimulus bill. . . a fifth under Obama. The others all failed, yet they think this one will work. That’s Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity: repeating the same action over and over, but expecting a different result. Hence, liberals are insane.



3. CAFE Standards Obama just introduced new fuel efficiency standards (CAFE) for trucks. Raising CAFE standards makes cars more expensive, driving down demand and keeping poor people in older, less-safe vehicles longer. What’s more, the one type of vehicle in which American car companies still dominate is the truck. This will hurt Detroit. I guess Obama’s slogan for 2012 will be, “The GM bailout was so successful, I want to repeat it in 2014!”



4. Obama Strong Warlord The last Democrat with any sense of how to win a war was Harry Truman, and he seemed to lose that by the time Korea came along. Since that time, the Democrats have become a party of pacifists, cowards and military incompetents. Obama looks to continue this ignoble tradition by tucking his tail in Afghanistan and Libya. But the Democrats want to portray him as a big tough killer. What to do? What to do?



Oh, I know. Let’s have Hollywood make a movie about Obama’s dithering over the killing of Osama bin Laden to prove his resolve of steal (hmm, is that spelled right?).



Here’s the catch. When Obama was thumping his chest after the military killed bin Laden, he got all of a three point bounce, which vanished again before the first shark took a bite out of bin Laden’s body. Obama got no bounce form running away in Iraq or cowering before Iran or Honduras. He got no bounce from the surge in Afghanistan. He got a negative bounce from bombing Libya. And Americans have stayed away in droves from every war film Hollywood has produced about the war on terror. Hmmm. So what makes liberals think this will help the man of steal? Insanity.



5. London Violence London police killed some gangbanger. According to liberals, it is outrageous that anyone should ever be killed and violence is unacceptable. So what do liberals do to protest? They start rioting in London, burning buses with people in them, beating people with baseball bats, etc. In other words, they have turned to massive, random violence to protest a single instance of probably justified violence. Nice.



As an "interesting" aside -- at least it will be interesting for most liberals (possibly even mind-boggling) -- the rioting stopped in London once the police threatened to use rubber bullets. The rioters moved on to other cities at that point. As a further aside, they don't riot in my neighborhood because we don't waste our time with rubber bullets.

Liberalism truly is a mental condition. Time and again, liberal policies lead to disaster and yet liberals absolutely refuse to see that. If at first you don’t succeed, just keep doing the same thing over and over until you get a different result. . . and don’t you dare try to fix any problems that may arise. Consider these examples.



1. Food Stamps For Rich College Kids Liberals believe in food stamps as a way to help poor people who “don’t earn enough to survive.” So you would assume liberals would want to stop rich and middle class moochers from exploiting the food stamp program? Apparently not.



Unlike other states, Michigan allows college kids to get food stamps. Federal law forbids this, but Michigan liberals got around that by classifying college as an “employment training program.” They also check eligibility for food stamps on the basis of income only without regard to assets. Hence, someone with a ton of money but no actual income can qualify for food stamps. . . someone like Leroy Fick, who won the state lottery but remained on food stamps.



Michigan is now changing its rules. College kids can now only get food stamps if they are single mothers or if they work more than 20 hours per week and still fall within income restrictions (assets will be considered as well). This change will kick 30,000 college kids off the program and save the state $75 million per year in food stamps.



Liberals should be thrilled. These middle class to rich moochers living comfortably on parental support and federal student loans, most of whom have better job prospects upon graduation than 90% of taxpayers, were robbing taxpayers (including “the working poor”) and draining the system, which prevented the money from reaching people who really needed it. But liberals aren’t outraged at the moochers, they’re outraged at the conservative governor who has made the change. Their reasoning? A change in the law to prevent the rich from taking money meant for the poor “will be unfair to the poor.”



Stupidity or insanity?



2. Stimulus Failure (redux): The evidence is indisputable that government spending to boost an economy in the short term is a disaster. I do believe careful spending in certain types of infrastructure can lead to long term growth. For example, the creation of a highway or getting electricity to people can create a wealth of opportunities as consumers and businesses make use of those services to reach each other. But you can’t boost an economy just by hiring people to build something.



History has shown this over and over. In fact, the biggest ignored lesson of the Great Depression came from FDR’s own Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, who wrote this in his diary about their efforts to stem the recession:

“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. . . [A]fter eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. . . and an enormous debt to boot!”

Sound familiar? Now the Democrats want to go for another stimulus bill. . . a fifth under Obama. The others all failed, yet they think this one will work. That’s Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity: repeating the same action over and over, but expecting a different result. Hence, liberals are insane.



3. CAFE Standards Obama just introduced new fuel efficiency standards (CAFE) for trucks. Raising CAFE standards makes cars more expensive, driving down demand and keeping poor people in older, less-safe vehicles longer. What’s more, the one type of vehicle in which American car companies still dominate is the truck. This will hurt Detroit. I guess Obama’s slogan for 2012 will be, “The GM bailout was so successful, I want to repeat it in 2014!”



4. Obama Strong Warlord The last Democrat with any sense of how to win a war was Harry Truman, and he seemed to lose that by the time Korea came along. Since that time, the Democrats have become a party of pacifists, cowards and military incompetents. Obama looks to continue this ignoble tradition by tucking his tail in Afghanistan and Libya. But the Democrats want to portray him as a big tough killer. What to do? What to do?



Oh, I know. Let’s have Hollywood make a movie about Obama’s dithering over the killing of Osama bin Laden to prove his resolve of steal (hmm, is that spelled right?).



Here’s the catch. When Obama was thumping his chest after the military killed bin Laden, he got all of a three point bounce, which vanished again before the first shark took a bite out of bin Laden’s body. Obama got no bounce form running away in Iraq or cowering before Iran or Honduras. He got no bounce from the surge in Afghanistan. He got a negative bounce from bombing Libya. And Americans have stayed away in droves from every war film Hollywood has produced about the war on terror. Hmmm. So what makes liberals think this will help the man of steal? Insanity.



5. London Violence London police killed some gangbanger. According to liberals, it is outrageous that anyone should ever be killed and violence is unacceptable. So what do liberals do to protest? They start rioting in London, burning buses with people in them, beating people with baseball bats, etc. In other words, they have turned to massive, random violence to protest a single instance of probably justified violence. Nice.



As an "interesting" aside -- at least it will be interesting for most liberals (possibly even mind-boggling) -- the rioting stopped in London once the police threatened to use rubber bullets. The rioters moved on to other cities at that point. As a further aside, they don't riot in my neighborhood because we don't waste our time with rubber bullets.

More Proof That Liberals Are Insane

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