Obama’s Private Army – It’s Not What You Think

What Do Oranges, Furnaces, and Your IRA Have in Common?

By Thomas Mullen

http://thomasmullen.blogspot.com

On Friday, an average American spent the entire day with the federal government without ever leaving his home. No, there was no knock on his door by some plain-clothes Gestapo. Neither was he treated to one of those infamous “no-knock raids” where a small army of thugs with various acronyms spelled out on their backs burst into the homes of the innocent and terrorize whomever happens to cross their paths. Nothing so dramatic happened that day. However, the long arm of the federal government made itself equally palpable nonetheless.

Privacy – With Health Care, Not A Priority

By Bruce McQuain

http://www.qando.net

The left certainly likes to give the right of privacy at least lip service as they tell you what you should be concerned with concerning government. But when it concerns something they want, privacy isn’t such an important right.

HR 3200, the infamous house health care insurance bill apparently proves that point quite handily. Nestled within its 1,000 plus pages is a provision, on top of all the other provisions noted previously, that should give real privacy rights advocates pause:

Section 431(a) of the bill says that the IRS must divulge taxpayer identity information, including the filing status, the modified adjusted gross income, the number of dependents, and “other information as is prescribed by” regulation. That information will be provided to the new Health Choices Commissioner and state health programs and used to determine who qualifies for “affordability credits.”

Section 245(b)(2)(A) says the IRS must divulge tax return details — there’s no specified limit on what’s available or unavailable — to the Health Choices Commissioner. The purpose, again, is to verify “affordability credits.”

Section 1801(a) says that the Social Security Administration can obtain tax return data on anyone who may be eligible for a “low-income prescription drug subsidy” but has not applied for it.

Of course the Privacy Act, that inconvenient law that requires agencies to get information not from other agencies but from the individual, is being pointedly ignored here. In fact, reading above, you’d think our “lawmakers” were completely unaware of their own laws.

Given most of them haven’t even read the bill, you’d be exactly right. Additionally, we find out that not all health care insurance reform is contained in the pending versions of health care insurance legislation:

A better candidate for a future privacy crisis is the so-called stimulus bill enacted with limited debate early this year. It mandated the “utilization of an electronic health record for each person in the United States by 2014,” but included only limited privacy protections.

That’s right – already passed into law, in the “stimulus” bill, and without any debate, is a mandate for the use of electronic health records.

Sound like “representative government” at work for you? Or does it sound like an increasingly intrusive government discarding your privacy for the sake of its own hoped for efficiency? Not that such access will provide a more efficient bureaucracy, but it sure will provide that bureaucracy with almost unlimited access to tax information about you and your family.

And that’s without ever getting into what this “Health Choices Commissar Commissioner” is supposed to do. Wouldn’t Orwell have a field day with all of this?

Tribute to the Porcelain God: This economy should be making you sick

By The Ans

Ralphing up Dollars.

Lunch (revisited).

Upchucking for fun and profit.

Regurgitating Godot.

Tossing up dimes.

Losing dinner.

Why the subject line?

We are riding on the thinnest of the razor’s edge. One false move and over we go. Wheeee!!!

The 07/08 patch was a warning, we need to change our ways but yet, we don’t. The next patch won’t be so … tame.

Most sense it but can’t put their finger on it, others are well aware but spin their wheels chasing this or that nostrum on the net and finally just get acrimonious. This constant state of upset usually includes some gastronomical event(s).

Hence the tag line.

Me, I’m mildly amused.

Hey, we got our tickets punched, might as well watch the show. Besides that I liked lunch so I prefer to keep it. It never tastes as good the second time anyway.

Blueprint for a Revolution

by Patrick Britton

The word seems to get thrown around too often: revolution. Sometimes the ideas presented behind a revolution aren’t solid enough to cause a force great enough to change the world. The founding fathers had a revolutionary idea. One that was so great thousands people died for that simple idea of freedom. Millions have died since in the name of freedom and many more will in the future. Freedom is an idea so revolutionary man will do anything to achieve it. Even if that means death.

Freedom is embedded in the DNA of every human being. We want to be allowed to live as we see fit. It’s no wonder so many people have died in the name of freedom. It’s no wonder slavery is seen as such an evil act, no man should be bound and not allowed to live freely. I can only imagine what Jefferson would say about the state of our current government. I am sure he would have a strong case of déjà vu. He would also morn, realizing the great dream of a free nation has quickly eroded and relapsed to our very beginning.

Rewind America

Democrats: Are they beginning to panic?

The Really Big Show in Washington

Democrats are running the show in Washington these days, and it seems that everybody in the country is very unhappy with the show’s performance so far. Notice how some of the leaders are starting to unravel, and beginning to throw out little panic statements: Vice President Joe Biden admits they misread the economy, which indirectly is an admission they did the wrong things to help the economy. As unemployment worsened, they admit that only about 10% of their spending solution has been applied, and now are in a panic to get more of the spending out. So, a porker of a stimulus package is going to put on steroids and doled out faster, and that’s supposed to be the solution. What are they going to do, they wanted the states to spend the money as quickly as possible, but the states are in such bad shape financially, all they seem to be doing is baling water to save themselves. It’s not clear the states are in a position to even spend more money. You know the old saw, ‘it takes money to make money’ in this case it takes money to spend money; so are the states in a position to even spend the stimulus money. A good portion of the porker-stimulus was for social mandates and programs, feel-good projects and make-do jobs, so it is quite clear to me, the Congressional dole-out was not going to do the job anyway.

The New, New Normal

By John Mauldin The New, New Normal A Different Perspective on Health Care Staying Rich in the New Normal

We are coming to a critical inflection point, perhaps the most critical point that we have had in 70 years for the US and to a great extent the global economy. The choices we make (or that Congress and the Fed make for us) will affect not just our investment portfolios but business and our jobs for a very long time. Last week I talked about the three paths we face as a nation. I want to go back to that theme and expand upon it. You need to clearly understand what the risks are so that you can interpret the actions and data that will be coming at us in the next few quarters.

Fun with Charts and Entitlements

More Fun with Charts

Ex IRS agent tells it like it is

Tipping Point

By Michael Wade

I can’t say with any certainty what this forebodes, but this is a staggering amount of debt to pile onto any country, especially within just a few months (my emphasis):

The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve have spent, lent or guaranteed $12.8 trillion, an amount that approaches the value of everything produced in the country last year, to stem the longest recession since the 1930s.

New pledges from the Fed, the Treasury Department and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. include $1 trillion for the Public-Private Investment Program, designed to help investors buy distressed loans and other assets from U.S. banks. The money works out to $42,105 for every man, woman and child in the U.S. and 14 times the $899.8 billion of currency in circulation. The nation’s gross domestic product was $14.2 trillion in 2008.

The really scary thing is, the government is not even close to being done spending money. Yet we’ve already committed about 90% of GDP. Where is all that money going to come from?

As we’ve said before, there’s only a few options: (1) taxes; (2) borrowing; and (3) printing press.